


When the Badger Grows Horns

by San Antonio Rose (ramblin_rosie)



Series: Dinéchesters AU [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Race Changes, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Cross-Posted on LiveJournal, F/M, Native American Character(s), Native American/First Nations Culture, Native American/First Nations Legends & Lore, Navajo John Winchester, Racebending Revenge Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-07
Updated: 2010-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27847058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ramblin_rosie/pseuds/San%20Antonio%20Rose
Summary: John Ashiihi Winchester was a warrior at heart, but once he left Dinétah, not even his beloved Grandmother Chee could foresee where his path would lead him -- or his sons.
Relationships: John Winchester/Mary Winchester
Series: Dinéchesters AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2038446
Kudos: 4
Collections: Racebending Revenge





	1. Ha’iinee’ Abíní

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the dark_agenda Racebending Revenge Challenge on Dreamwidth. There are much longer and more detailed notes following the epilogue, but I thought I ought to warn up front about potentially offensive language about minorities—none of the big bads, but irksome at best—and characters expressing opinions about minorities that I, the author, do not share. Also, the character deaths and relationships portrayed align with canon. There are some very oblique references to Season 6, most of which were unintentional, but no real spoilers past 5.22.
> 
> Many thanks to my very kind beta kcrenegade—you’ve helped me immeasurably!
> 
> For this fic, the part of John Winchester will be played by Ray Tracey.

Joining the Marines was a no-brainer. Practically every man he knew who had been old enough, and some who hadn’t been, had enlisted during World War II, and most of them had served with distinction in the Pacific as Marines. Some of them had stories they couldn’t tell him until their program was declassified; others had stories they wouldn’t tell at all unless they were well and truly drunk. But all of them said it was a good and honorable thing for a _Diné_ warrior to be a United States Marine.

So on his eighteenth birthday, John Ashiihi Winchester drove to the recruiter’s office in Tuba City, Arizona, and signed on the dotted line. He’d tried to sign up when he was sixteen, but the recruiter had told him that things weren’t _that_ desperate in Vietnam yet. But they couldn’t keep him out now.

Truth be told, however, it wasn’t just his heritage that drove John to life in the military. Like many kids his age, he was beginning to tire of the old ways and yearned for a chance to experience life outside the reservation, but he’d never had the patience to do well enough in school to even think about going to college. He wasn’t stupid; he just preferred learning to _do_ rather than learning to think. He’d gotten to be pretty good at fixing cars, though, and his dad thought he had a shot at making a pretty good living as a mechanic. Joining the Marines would give him the chance to hone his craft and get out of Arizona for a few years, let him figure out what he wanted from life, what he believed, where and who he was meant to be.

Basic training at Camp Pendleton was almost laughably easy, given the training his grandmother had been putting him through since he was six. His father and uncles had prepared him for the jibes he would get from the white recruits and the harassment he would get from his instructors, and though the words did sometimes sting and he suspected the sergeant of being far harder on him than he was on the whites, he also knew that once he had earned their respect, he would make some friends.

And so it proved. There weren’t _very_ many whites who were willing to be buddies with “the chief” under normal conditions, but John had never been one who needed more than a handful of friends. The fact that he was clean, sober, and willing to work got most of the sergeants off his back, and the weekend he cheerfully spent in the brig after sending a Klansman’s son to the hospital (the idiot was armed but drunk; John was unarmed but fast) got the other privates to leave him alone.

Then they shipped out to Vietnam, and grudging respect gave way to outright awe as John proved himself adept at saving his comrades’ lives. “Chief” was no longer a slur; it was a title, as much a badge of honor as the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and corporal’s stripes he earned over four long years in and out of theater. His fellow mechanics Mike Guenther and Bill Deacon told anyone who’d listen at home that he should have been a Master Sergeant, that he deserved twice the medals he’d been awarded, but John shrugged it off. The real heroes never made it home, he’d say. He was only doing his job.

_Unlike the gods_ , he would occasionally add to himself. He’d never quite been sold on the old beliefs of the _Diné_ , but the one time he’d cried out to the Holy People to save a wounded friend—one of the few who’d actually taken an interest in _Diné_ culture, a draftee who hadn’t quite been able to convince himself to run to Canada and was just starting to think that maybe he’d made the right decision to join the Marines after all—they hadn’t answered and the boy had died. John didn’t know which option was worse: that the gods were dead, that they were powerless, or that they just didn’t care. Regardless, he resolved not to rely on the supernatural for anything, not when he knew his buddies had his back, a fact that Deacon proved shortly afterward by saving _his_ life for a change.

Amá Sání Chee insisted on having an Enemy Way ceremony for him when he returned home at the end of his hitch in ’72, but John put no faith in it. When he wanted to forget, Jack Daniels was stronger medicine, assuming he could find a bootlegger (and he usually could, federal law or no federal law).

But John still didn’t know what he wanted out of life after the military, and he floundered until his pal Mike showed up on the doorstep of the Winchesters’ hooghan not two months after they got back to the States. Mike cheerfully endured the interrogation from John’s mother and grandmother about his family, his friendship with John, and his plans, which led to a major revelation: Mike was considering going to college on the GI Bill, and he wanted John to come on a road trip with him to check out some possibilities, including his first choice, the University of Kansas.

“Rock Chalk Jayhawk,” John laughed.

Mike laughed, too, but shook his head. “No, seriously, Chief, you should come check it out. There’s an Indian college in Lawrence, too, if you can’t get in at KU.”

John laughed again. “What do I want with college, man? I’m a mechanic.”

“ _Please_ , John,” Mike pleaded. “I just... I need a friend to do this with me. California’s no place for a Jarhead right now, and... did you hear that Dooley shot himself?”

John sobered. “No. No, I didn’t know that.” And then he deliberately glanced at his parents, willing Mike to realize that this wasn’t a safe topic for conversation.

Mike understood, at least partly. “Anyway, I... I just need to have a friend with me, that’s all. So I don’t... do something stupid.”

That was a disturbing thought—but it wasn’t like John’s drinking was much healthier, as his mother Emily constantly reminded him.

“There aren’t many jobs around here, son,” Joe Winchester noted. “There might be something better for you in Kansas.”

“I think you should go, John,” said Amá Sání, and that settled it.  


* * *

Lawrence was flat and crowded and had too many trees, and Mike laughed at John for saying so. Granted, they had just come back from the jungle, so he should have been used to trees, but at least those trees had had character, like the evergreens that grew in Dinétah. Vietnamese trees were exotic. Kansas trees were boring.

There were also the niggling voices in the back of his mind telling him a) that he shouldn’t be thinking about settling down among whites and b) that he shouldn’t be thinking about settling on what ought to be Kanza territory, a thousand miles from Dinétah, but mostly he was just bored senseless after two days of bumming around town while Mike did his thing at KU. At least in the desert he knew what to _do_.

John was hanging out at the counter at Jay Bird’s Diner, nursing a cup of coffee and waiting for Mike to get there for lunch after meeting with someone in KU’s engineering department, when the seat beside him was suddenly taken by a white girl. “Are you a Haskell student?” she asked after placing her order.

John tamped down his immediate irrational irritation at the question—he’d had far more offensive greetings in the past, after all—and smiled politely. “No, I’m here with a friend, a Marine buddy, who’s thinking about studying at KU.”

She pushed her feathered blonde hair out of her wide blue eyes, and the religious charms on her silver bracelet jingled, which was even more irritating. “Oh, you were in the Marines! Did you just get back from Vietnam?”

“Yeah, a couple months ago. Still kind of at loose ends, y’know? Mike’s trying to talk me into going to KU with him, but... I dunno. I kind of like being a mechanic.”

“I wish I could go to college,” the girl sighed. “My dad doesn’t see the point. Says I don’t need school to do well in the family business.”

John frowned. “I guess that depends on what the family business is.”

“Doesn’t matter. I want out of it.” At John’s odd look, she continued, “It’s... we have to travel a lot. I mean, we live here in Lawrence, but Dad gets called to jobs all over the country, and he usually takes Mom and me with him. And I’m tired of it, y’know? I want to be able to stay in one place, have my own house, my own land, live a quiet, normal, settled life.”

“Well, I don’t know from normal, but I do know from wanting out. The old ways... I mean, they’re not all bad, but I’m tired of living in the past. It’s not like the gods of my people ever did anything for me anyway.”

Something flashed in the girl’s eyes then, and he expected some kind of retort, but it never came. Instead she started asking the kinds of questions he’d expect from a woman back home—what tribe he was from, where he lived, what his family did, what he’d done in the Marines. She didn’t offer much information about herself, but she did let slip that her father had done some work in Shiprock once, and from there the discussion turned to the desert and the lessons one could learn from nature, and by the time Mike _finally_ showed up an hour later, both John and the girl had eaten their lunches without realizing it. She looked at her watch with a guilty start and said she had to dash off to meet her father somewhere nearby.

“But it was very nice to meet you....”

“Oh, I’m sorry! John, John Winchester.”

“Mary Campbell.”

She offered him her hand to shake... and something happened that he could never afterward explain, though he better understood what the Romans had meant about Cupid’s arrow.

“Mary, would you meet me here for supper tonight?” he heard himself asking. “Maybe we could, I dunno, go for a walk afterward or something.”

Mary blinked, surprised, and then suddenly smiled. “Yes... yes, I think I’d like that. What time?”

“Make it 6,” Mike offered. “You could get to a drive-in by 7.”

“Six o’clock,” Mary promised.

And suddenly Lawrence didn’t seem so boring anymore.  


* * *

Neither family approved, of course, but at least the _Diné_ did not disown children for marrying outsiders. John knew enough non- _Diné_ people who had been disowned over marriages to believe that the elders were right about one thing: it was wrong to destroy the sacred unit of the family. For her part, Mary didn’t seem to care if her father disowned her for dating an Indian. She wanted out of the family business anyway, she told John repeatedly, and her father had never approved of any of her boyfriends. Her mother liked John, and that was good enough for both of them.

Amá Sání was slightly less displeased with John when his father wrote to relatives in Shiprock and found out that the “job” Samuel Campbell had done there had supposedly involved killing a group of skinwalkers. _It seems your Mary is from a strong clan, son,_ Joe wrote to John. _But we don’t blame her for wanting to leave such a life. It was not Changing Woman, but her sons who were charged with ridding the Glittering World of monsters._

John didn’t believe in skinwalkers, and he wasn’t sure he believed in Changing Woman or the Hero Twins. But he did believe in Mary, found her strong and intelligent, loved the fire in her eyes and the way she walked even taller when people hurled insults at them in the park. They were rebelling together, and it was glorious.

Mike and John had stopped at a garage owned by an older man who was willing to hire them and eventually sell the shop to Mike. So the two of them had gotten an apartment together and kept up the fiction at work of Mike being John’s supervisor, and Mike spent his nights taking business classes at KU while John spent his nights teaching Mary _Diné bizaad_ and occasionally taking her to the movies. She even got him to stop drinking more than a beer or two after work.

“She’s got you whipped, Chief,” Deacon teased when he came up from Little Rock to visit at Christmas.

“ _Diné_ society is a matriarchy,” John objected. “Our women are _supposed_ to be strong.”

“Oh, so that’s why you hooked up with Mary, Queen of Scots?” Mike jibed. At John’s frown, he explained, “One of the guys she went to high school with is in my accounting class. That’s what they used to call her, ’cause she was so... aloof, I guess.”

“Mary, Queen of Scots, was a Stewart, not a Campbell,” said Deacon, who knew these things. “Closest a Campbell’s been to the throne was Robert the Bruce’s brother-in-law.”

But John tuned out the ensuing argument about Scottish history and thought about his own Scottish princess. And he realized suddenly that he couldn’t picture going through life with any other bride.

Just as suddenly, he realized that he didn’t know how white families handled marriages. The usual _Diné_ way was for the groom’s parents to approach the bride’s parents with a dowry, but he didn’t think Samuel Campbell would take kindly to the Winchesters turning up on his doorstep with a horse.

“Hey, guys?” John interrupted, and somehow Mike and Deacon knew what he was about to ask and got very serious.  


* * *

Mary suspected. She was too smart not to pick up on his skimping on date costs after the first week, and he knew he needed at least another couple of months to save up enough for a decent ring, a car, and a place of their own. So John decided to try to throw her off the scent somewhat by asking her opinion about the car. After a few weeks of looking, she plumped for a VW van that she’d spotted at Rainbow Motors, a used car lot just down the street from the diner where they’d first met. It was a hippie van, but she was something of a hippie herself, so it suited her.

John mostly worked on domestics, so he wrote to his father asking his opinion about the van, not telling him why he wanted to buy it. Joe wrote back telling him to trust his gut, and in the envelope were a silver-and-turquoise ring made by one of the Chee cousins and a check large enough for the van and the first month’s rent on an apartment.

_Shimásání knows me too well_ , he thought with a sigh as he went to deposit the check.

But of course, he couldn’t suddenly stop saving or tell Mary he was buying the car with the money for her dowry. So it was the end of April of ’73, when he had enough for two months’ rent on a house he’d found, before Mary started wondering when he was going to buy the van.

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” he promised, and that night he told Mike he’d be late getting to work the next day.

The salesman did a poor job of concealing his uncertainty about doing business with an Indian, but he was only too happy to cut John a deal for the van, which had been sitting in the lot since Christmas. That gave John pause, but he had promised—

“ _’Aii chidí doo nín’zin’ígíí da_ ,” a male voice said as soon as the salesman went inside to get the paperwork.

John spun around to face a drifter for whom he’d bought a cup of coffee at the diner earlier that morning. He hadn’t recognized the guy as _Diné_ before. His skin was darker than most Anglos, his cheekbones higher, and he wore a buckskin jacket that was a little too big for him, but his short, spiky hair was a chestnut brown, and his eyes were green....

“ _Yáát’ééh_ ,” the drifter smirked from his perch on the hood of a black ’67 Impala.

“Are you following me?” John demanded in English.

“No, I was just passing. I never got a chance to thank you for the cup of coffee.”

“ _Kót’ée ga’ Diné bikéyahdi_ ,” John shrugged, slipping into his native language before he could catch himself.

The smirk grew into a knowing grin, but the drifter continued speaking English. “Let me repay the favor.” He patted the car he was sitting on. “This is the one you want.”

“Oh, yeah? You know something about cars?”

This time the drifter slipped into _Diné bizaad_ as his smile turned wistful. “ _Shizhé’é yéé ho’ałtsosįįh yínaashineeztą́ą́_.” Then he switched back to English and proceeded to persuade John that the gently-used Impala was far superior to the well-worn van, and John couldn’t argue with him.

“John Winchester,” he finally said by way of both agreement and introduction. “ _Ashiihi ei’ nishli, Tódích’íi’nii bá shíshchíín. Ahéhee’._ ”

“Dean Van Halen,” replied the drifter, shaking hands. “ _Bilagáana ei’ nishli, Tséghadínídinii bá shíshchíín_. Man, that diner needs to do something about those rotten eggs, huh?”

“Rotten eggs? Sulfides?”

“Yeah, you didn’t smell ’em?”

“No.”

“Might have just been me, then... I was getting chills, too. Did you feel anything like that, cold spots?”

This conversation was taking a turn for the odd, even by Navajo standards. “No... are you sure you’re okay?”

“As okay as I can be...” Dean trailed off into a language John didn’t recognize and shook his head. “Well, look, I would love to stay and chat, but I’m supposed to meet up with someone who doesn’t run on Indian time.”

John laughed at that, and Dean flashed him one last grin, bade him farewell, and disappeared through the car lot. The salesman was disappointed that John had changed his mind, but John knew how to drive a bargain, and in the end he got the Impala for slightly less than the original price on the van. Mike heartily approved and agreed to help get her back in prime condition as his wedding gift.

All that morning John wondered about Dean, how he’d come to be in Lawrence, why he hadn’t known what day it was, why he was carrying on about sulfur and cold spots—he clearly hadn’t been drunk or stoned—and what his life was like as the son of a mixed marriage. But then the garage was suddenly swamped with customers, and Mike started needling him about whether he’d present the ring along with the car that night, and the stranger slipped John’s mind.

Mary was less impressed with his choice of vehicles, but he was able to persuade her over milkshakes that it was the better choice. She was also thoroughly unimpressed with her father’s reaction to the news that John was buying her a car: he expected her home _before_ dinner that night. “You know, I want to believe he’s just being overprotective of me, because I’ve never known him to be a racist and Dad’s always scared off my boyfriends before, but sometimes I have to wonder. Especially with what’s been going on at Wounded Knee.”

John sighed. “Working with someone of a different race isn’t the same as allowing your daughter to marry him.”

“Hey.” Mary took his hand, looked him in the eye, and said very carefully, “ _Nít’éego niidooshąął_.”

She was a prize, his Mary, and he kissed her hand gently.

Then something outside caught her eye, and she excused herself briefly. When she came back in, she insisted that she needed to get home before her dad did something they’d all regret, and later that night she called to say that she’d probably be out of touch for a couple of days because of an emergency with the family business. When he got home, John stared at the ring his cousin had made and hoped with all his might that he hadn’t done something wrong, that she wasn’t having second thoughts about marrying an Indian, that her father wasn’t threatening her life.

She called again two days later, begging him to come over. As soon as he stepped out of the car, she launched herself off the porch and into his arms.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking down at her in alarm.

“You promised you’d take me away,” she said into his shirt. “ _K’ad’ee’, tsį́į́łgo._ ”

So he did.

He thought.

His memory of exactly what happened when he tried to propose was fuzzy afterward, though he thought it involved someone with yellow eyes (!) trying to break his neck. But somehow he ended up on the ground with his head in Mary’s lap, Samuel Campbell lying dead a few feet away from a stab wound through the heart, a stolen car and an antique gun abandoned a hundred yards away, the stench of raw sulfur in the air, and Mary bawling her eyes out and babbling something about both of her parents being dead.

John knew they couldn’t call the police. Mary was the only witness who could swear he hadn’t killed her father, and her word might not be enough if the investigator wasn’t willing to accept the evidence that the wound had been self-inflicted; given the conflicting reports about the ongoing AIM standoff at Wounded Knee, John suspected that the law in Lawrence would jump at the chance to pin a murder on an Indian. And besides, despite his agnosticism and his experiences in ’Nam, the _Diné_ taboos regarding dead bodies were still deeply engrained in his psyche. So instead, when they found a phone booth, Mary called her uncle Robert, who promised to take care of everything, and John called Mike to let him know he needed a week or two off for a family emergency (“No, man, not Vegas... okay, yes, we’re eloping, but there’s more to it than that”). Then John slid the ring onto Mary’s finger and kissed her forehead, and they made tracks for Dinétah.

The Impala proved itself that night, easily managing the 100-mph average needed to get from Lawrence to Tuba City in the amount of time Robert Campbell had allotted for them to make their getaway. Mary was exhausted with grief and slept the whole way, but John was running on adrenaline and managed to get them all the way to the Winchester hooghan before sunrise. Predictably, the entire Chee family heard the car coming and ran out to meet them, and they all asked the same three questions: where’d you get the car; is this your Mary; and what happened?

Mary did all the talking; John managed to assure her that he was not going to die before he dragged himself to bed and slept until lunchtime. And apparently she acquitted herself well, because by the time he got up, his parents had already made all the arrangements for the wedding to take place the next day and Amá Sání Chee was quizzing her on her _Diné bizaad_. When Mary stumbled on a word that was a tongue-twister for an English speaker and blushed in embarrassment, Amá Sání chuckled kindly and patted her hand.

“You have found a good woman, my grandson,” said Amá Sání. “May you both walk in beauty.”

Mary broke down at that, and Amá Sání shooed John outside and held Mary as she wept, and John ate at his aunt’s hooghan and mused on the tales of Changing Woman all afternoon as he and his father and uncles built the hooghan for the wedding.

It was good to be home, he realized, to be in harmony with the land once more and to have his family around him. But something in him had changed during his months in Lawrence, and he was about to become a Campbell; even if he didn’t know what that meant, he knew it was not his destiny to stay.

“Do you need us to go back with you, John?” Joe asked toward sundown.

“No, Dad,” John sighed. “Mary’s uncle is taking care of it. I think she wants to sell the place anyway.”

“Good,” said Uncle Ron. “Better to abandon the house, but I don’t guess the _Bilagáana_ would think so.”

John didn’t want to argue about superstitions at the moment, so he simply said, “City houses attract worse than ghosts when they’re empty.”

Amá Sání took Mary back to her own hooghan that night to prepare her for the wedding and to chat with her about the woman’s role in the Navajo home. But John was so nervous about... well, everything that he wound up sleeping in the car. He didn’t know why, but it felt almost like a hooghan to him.

The wedding was subdued; only the Chee relatives were present, and the singer skipped all but the most sacred parts of the ceremony. But even in her grief and solitude, so far from home and family and all that she knew, Mary was beautiful, and John knew he’d made the right choice.

“This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a honeymoon cottage,” Mary said with a rueful chuckle after the family finally left them alone in the wedding hooghan. “But I guess it is romantic in its way.”

“I’m sorry, Mary,” John sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I’m... I mean, if you’d rather....”

Mary’s smile turned fond, and she shut him up with a kiss.  


* * *

The telegram from Mike with the funeral arrangements arrived shortly after sunrise the next morning, but Joe gave the newlyweds privacy until mid-morning and then handed the telegram to Mary unopened. Robert Campbell had apparently called in some favors at the coroner’s office, so the official story was that Samuel had had a heart attack and Deanna had fallen down the stairs in her haste to get him help. There was only a memorial service to be held at First Presbyterian Church in Lawrence on the afternoon of May 6; the couple’s ashes would be buried in the family plot in Greenville, Illinois.

Mary snorted at that. “That’s where the _marker_ will be,” she muttered, but she didn’t say anything more than that.

John looked again at the time of the memorial and did some quick mental math. “If we leave now, we can probably make it into Kansas before we have to stop for the night.”

But of course, the rest of the family wouldn’t let them leave until after lunch, what with farewells and advice and condolences and gift-giving, so they got only as far as Lamar, Colorado, before John decided to stop. The motel didn’t have a honeymoon suite, but it was reasonably clean and cheap enough that John could afford to call Mike before it got too late even by the roommates’ standards. However, once the “You’re _where_?” and “Man, when you say family emergency...” parts of the conversation were over, it turned out that Mike didn’t have much more news, so John cut the call short and joined Mary in bed.

“Is this more like what you had in mind?” he asked as he settled in beside her.

“Closer,” she giggled and switched off the lamp.

They were on the road again before dawn and went directly to the church, where John met Uncle Robert for the first time and felt as awkward and out of place as he knew Mary must have felt at the wedding. And it wasn’t just the fact that the very public display of emotion was completely counter to _Diné_ taboos. Not a few of the mourners, whom he gathered had mostly been Deanna’s childhood friends, openly stared at him, and he even heard a couple of whispers of “I didn’t think Mary was so wild” and “No wonder Samuel had a heart attack.”

Mary heard them, too, and made a point of dabbing her eyes with her left hand, so that everyone could see the wedding ring, and introducing everyone in the condolence line to “my husband John.” But John struggled to say “Thank you for coming” with even half the false sincerity that most of the mourners put behind their perfunctory “Sorry for your loss, Mary.” After a while he gave up saying it in English, and the blank looks he got in return gave him a crazy idea; by the end he was responding deadpan with the _Diné bizaad_ equivalents of one-liners from _Laugh-In_ , especially “Is that another chicken joke?” Mary barely managed to keep her composure long enough for the end of the line to get out the door before she collapsed against him in a fit of hysterical laughter.

“... it wasn’t _that_ funny,” said John.

“Don’t tell me you _understood_ him,” said Uncle Robert.

“I got the gist,” Mary gasped. “Look _that_ up in your Funk and Wagnall’s!” And she was off again.

At Uncle Robert’s raised eyebrow, John shrugged. “It was a long drive.”

Uncle Robert cleared his throat. “Listen, sweetheart, John’s right; you’ve been on the road a long time. And I don’t think anyone else is coming to the graveside. Why don’t you two wait to come to Greenville until after you get the estate settled?”

Mary sobered. “Estate—didn’t you....”

“There isn’t much left to do. Mostly your things to pack up, and I thought you’d want the furniture and your mom’s dishes. The realtor’s already had some interest in the house, and the... gun’s owner has already reclaimed it.”

“I’ve got the week off,” John assured her. If there were evil spirits hanging around the Campbell place, he was not about to let her face them alone; and if there weren’t, she still needed his support.

She studied his face for a moment and nodded. “Okay.”

And somehow John knew they were never going to set foot in Greenville.


	2. Nihighan ’Ayóii Hooghan ’Át’é

“John?” Mary said as they carried her parents’ bedstead outside the next afternoon. “I was wondering... how did your father’s family end up with the name Winchester?”

John took a deep cleansing breath, let it out again, and shrugged. “It was... 1868, I think. The family had escaped the Long Walk by hiding among the Zuni, so when the People came back to the new reservation, my family had to register with the BIA. Of course, the BIA man couldn’t understand my ancestor’s name. But someone remembered him admiring one of the new repeating rifles that the soldiers had; we weren’t allowed to own guns then, but my ancestor said he wished he could have a hunting weapon that didn’t need reloading after every shot.”

“So the BIA man said ‘Winchester’ and your ancestor reacted?”

“Yep.”

Mary laughed. It was a quiet, subdued laugh—he wouldn’t have expected anything else, considering their task—but it still helped to clear John’s mood somewhat. Gone was the edge of hysteria that had tinged her laughter after the funeral, which had worried him a little. And the sound was oddly reassuring. They’d burned sage in the living room just to be safe, even though Mary was sure her parents’ spirits had moved on, but superstition or not, John was still uncomfortable being in a house where someone had been murdered, and helping Mary pack up the last remnants of her past wasn’t exactly fun. They would both be glad to be done.

Even so, the task was proving to be easier than either of them had feared. Uncle Robert had indeed cleared out almost everything except the major pieces of furniture, the kitchen furnishings, and Mary’s bedroom, and he’d left enough packing supplies for the things that remained. One of the neighbors offered to take the things they didn’t want to Goodwill. Mr. Woodsen, the garage owner, had very kindly loaned the newlyweds a pickup and a flatbed trailer onto which to load the pieces they were keeping. And by some minor miracle (though Mary hadn’t seemed surprised), the house John had wanted to rent was available for immediate move-in. So by the time Mike got off work that evening and arrived to help and to deliver what remained of John’s things, both the truck and the Impala were loaded and ready to go, and John already had the keys to 485 Robintree. All Mary had to do was to lock the front door of her childhood home and leave her key in a lockbox for the realtor.

John thought he heard some murmurs of “There goes the neighborhood” from some of their new neighbors when they started unloading the truck at the new place, but Mary just said, “Ignore them, _shiyéyóó_ ,” and kissed his cheek.

Once the Winchesters were settled in their new home, their lives fell into a pleasant, quiet routine. The Campbell house sold quickly, and Mary put that money and all the rest of her inheritance into savings so that they could afford to buy their own house when they had kids. John stayed on at the garage, and once she found someone to carpool with, Mary took a part-time clerical job at KU. They went back to Arizona for Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, and John bought a CB radio for the Impala so that they didn’t have to wait until they got to his parents’ hooghan to begin their visits. They also made friends in Lawrence and got involved with the community in small ways, and John slowly acclimated to life outside the reservation even as he let his hair grow out to shoulder-length. Mike met a nice woman named Kate and married her a year later. Mr. Woodsen set a date for his retirement. Seasons changed. Technology changed. Styles changed. Good economic times came, went, and threatened to stay gone. Oil shortages made national news. Cars started becoming more “fuel-efficient.” President Carter set the national speed limit at 55 mph, though John tended to disregard that fact as soon as they passed a city when they went back to Dinétah. Mary wrote down everything that happened, in spite of John teasing her that her journals must make for pretty boring reading looking back. She simply smiled and refused to let him read any of them, preferring to keep the old ones locked in the safe with his revolver.

And for five years, aside from an occasional phone call from Uncle Robert, the Campbells never made any attempt to remain in contact with the Winchesters. It bothered John far more than it did Mary, who seemed to think she was better off staying as far away from her side of the family as possible. She put it down to disagreements over the family business far more than any concerns about her having married an Indian.

Then one dark and not-yet-stormy night in mid-May of 1978, shortly after John got home from work, Mary answered the doorbell with what sounded to John like a hushed and hurried attempt to get someone—a male someone—to leave. So John cleared his throat and walked up behind her to greet the two very tall, very tan, very green-eyed men who were looming over his wife.

Mary turned back to him. “Sorry, _shiyéyóó_. They were just....”

“Mary’s cousins,” said the shorter of the two with a grin. “We couldn’t stop in town without swingin’ by and sayin’ hey, now, could we?” He held out his hand. “Dean.”

And that jogged a distant memory; John couldn’t quite place it, though. “You look familiar,” he said as he shook hands.

Dean blinked. “Really? You do, too, actually, you know. We must have met at some time. Small towns, right? Gotta love ’em.”

John returned the smile and turned to the other man, who looked dazed. “I’m John.”

The other man, his long chestnut hair tied back like a _Diné_ elder’s, took his hand but didn’t speak.

“This is Sam,” Dean supplied.

“Sam? Mary’s father was a Sam.”

“Yeah, it’s a family name.”

Sam nodded, but he didn’t let go of John’s hand. In fact, it looked like he was fighting tears. But when John called him on it, he let go, snapped out of whatever funk he was in, and blamed it on the long drive.

And _then_ Mary tried several times to prevent John from inviting them inside for a beer.

Well, she might have been head of the house, but John was not about to let these Campbells get away without a proper visit. One of his chief complaints about life in the city was that too few of their friends were willing to take the time to just sit and chat, and Mary had agreed every time he’d brought it up before; but these cousins seemed very willing to stay, so John didn’t understand what Mary’s problem was. She was even discourteous enough to try to convince them not to stay for supper.

Before they could actually argue about it, however, the phone rang, and John left Mary with the Campbells while he answered it. It was just as well that he did, too, because it was Mr. Woodsen calling to tell John that he was going to have to cut John’s hours, if not let him go altogether. After a moment of quiet pleading, John convinced Mr. Woodsen to meet with him—but the old man would brook no delay. He wanted John at the garage in ten minutes or else.

John bit his lip as he hung up, shooting a quick glance into the living room. He hated to leave without warning, but Mary and her cousins were deep in discussion about something, so maybe he could get there and back without anyone noticing his absence. So he scribbled a note and dashed out to the car.

He got to the garage in under five minutes, but the place was dark. John let himself in, called for his boss, and turned on the lights.

That was when he saw Mr. Woodsen’s corpse in the middle of the shop floor.

John froze with his hand on the light switch. It had been five years since he’d last been that close to a dead body, and he’d wanted to keep it that way. But before he could back out and go for help, a red-haired woman emerged from the shadows and threw him across the room with one hand. She wavered as he got to his feet, but before he could properly attack her, she threw him again, and this time he blacked out briefly.

He came to just in time to see Dean go flying and Mary— _his Mary_ —pick up a silver short sword that Dean had dropped and start fighting with _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ as if she’d been training for hand-to-hand combat all her life. It did her no good, even when she found a tire iron and plunged it through _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ ’s chest; all _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ did was to bleed and to pull the tool out of her chest.

“Sorry,” _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ said as Mary stared. “It’s not that easy to kill an angel.”

... A _what?_

“No,” called Sam from another part of the shop, “but you can distract them.”

John had just enough time to register the blood on Sam’s hand before Sam slammed his open palm against some kind of sign he’d drawn on the wall. Light flared from it, and _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ vanished.

Radiating fear and guilt, Mary turned to meet John’s eyes. But John could only stare in disbelief. Hearing third-hand that Mary was from a family that hunted skinwalkers was one thing; this... this was something else.

Sam raced outside to help Dean while Mary pulled John to his feet. “We need to get out of here before she gets back,” she said quietly.

John glanced back at Sam and Dean, who looked to be no worse than winded, and nodded. “We should take just one car; your cousins won’t get lost that way.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“We shouldn’t try to drive all the way to Arizona tonight, though.”

Mary smiled a little and shook her head. “No, I... I know of someplace closer, a safe house about fifty miles from here. Not many people outside the family know about it.”

Sam and Dean had joined them by that point. “Sounds like a plan,” said Dean. “We gotta get somethin’ out of our car, and then we can go.” He then gave John a critical once-over. “You doin’ okay there, John?”

John bristled and drew himself up to his full height. “I’m fine.”

Dean nodded once in satisfaction, and the Campbell cousins walked away as if they shared a mind. John put an arm around Mary’s shoulders and walked her out to the Impala, waiting by her door as the cousins pulled a duffle bag out of their trunk and slid into the back seat in a way that seemed oddly right yet incredibly wrong.

John managed to hold himself together long enough for Mary to give him enough directions to get out of Lawrence before yelling, “What the _hell_ just happened back there?!”

“That,” said Dean, “was Anna. She’s... well, let’s just say she’s a monster. It’s kind of a long story, all tied up with... with the family business.”

“Monsters. _Monsters_.”

“Yes,” Mary replied, sounding guilty—whether for keeping the secret or for letting John be attacked by one, he wasn’t sure.

“Monsters are real?”

“I’m sorry....”

John ignored Mary. “And you _fight_ them? _All_ of you?”

“Yeah,” Sam confirmed.

Then they all started defending this insanity at the same time, and John... might have exploded just a little. After that, aside from Mary giving directions and the Campbells murmuring something to each other that John didn’t catch, the car was silent for the rest of the trip.

The fact that they kept talking past him once they got to the Campbells’ safe house didn’t help his mood any, either, nor did the fact that they kept treating him like a civilian who needed to be protected instead of the Marine he was. Not until John sliced open his own hand to draw the blood needed for the sigil Dean said they needed did Dean seem inclined to take him seriously. So when Sam came to check on his sigil-drawing progress, John snapped at him and suggested that his father was irresponsible for raising him and Dean in this life rather than keeping them safe.

“He was trying,” Sam replied, looking hurt. “He died trying.”

John frowned. Suddenly this conversation was giving him the strangest feeling—almost like Sam wasn’t sure whether he was talking _about_ his father or _to_ his father.

Sam went on to explain very briefly how his mother’s death had driven his father to hunt and how Sam had once hated the man. “Truth is,” he concluded, “my dad died before I got to tell him that... _hádí biniinaa ’ást’į bik’i’diishtííh. Doo nihish’į ’ást’į jiinishba’. Doo... yishąąd_.”

John had no idea what to say to that, and he wasn’t sure what was more unsettling, the sentiment, the way Sam had looked him in the eye when he said it, or the fact that he’d slipped into _Diné bizaad_ without seeming to realize it... almost as if that were the language in which he wished he’d been able to reconcile with his father. That didn’t make sense; Dean had said that they were distant cousins but that Samuel Campbell had been like their grandfather. But none of the Campbells had ever indicated that there was another _Diné_ in the family.

—Sam couldn’t really have been talking about _him_ , could he?! The man was in his late twenties, at least; how could he be John’s son, talking about him as if he were already dead?

Feeling awkward, John turned away from Sam and started drawing another sigil on the back door. From his new position, John could just overhear Dean and Mary talking, and whatever Dean was saying was making Mary progressively more upset until:

“We’re from the year 2010. An angel zapped us back here—not like the one that attacked you. Friendlier.”

... Maybe Sam _had_ been talking about John. Time travel would explain a lot.

“You can’t expect me to believe that,” said Mary.

Dean paused and started over, and John found himself unable not to listen. “ _Nilchíní niidlį́į́._ Dean Winchester _yinishyé – bíká nimí, nihimásání yinishyé. Dóone’é Campbell ei’ nishli, Ashiihi bá shíshchíín_. Sam Winchester _shitsílí bidiné – bíká nizhé’é, nihicheii bidiné._ _Bénáshnii_ —when I would get sick, you would make me tomato rice soup because that’s what Amá Sání used to make you. And instead of a lullaby, you would sing ‘Hey Jude’—that’s your favorite Beatles song.”

Mary was clearly fighting tears as she returned, “I... I don’t believe it. No.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

John drew a deep breath, shook his head a little, and got back to work. The concept was mind-boggling, sure, but really, if monsters and blood magic were real, why _not_ time travel? If he had to be rescued by anybody from the future, he’d rather it be his own sons, especially since they seemed to be good men. But he did try not to listen to whatever Dean was telling Mary about their future, given the grim nature of what little he’d already heard from Sam; Mary would write it down later, he was sure, and she would tell him if it was something she thought he needed to know.

Of course, she hadn’t thought he needed to know about fighting monsters until one tried to kill him, and he would apparently end up doing it himself one day....

Then, just as John finished the sigil, Sam joined the conversation in some language John didn’t know, and his curiosity got the better of him again, so he was listening when Sam said five English words to Mary that nearly stopped John’s heart:

“You’ve got to leave John.”

“ _What?_ ” Mary gasped.

“When this is all over, walk away and never look back.”

“ _Bithidh sinn nior air rugadh_ ,” Dean said, falling back into that other strange language briefly. “He’s right.”

“I can’t,” Mary replied. “You’re saying that you’re my children, and now you’re saying....”

“You have no other choice,” Sam interrupted.

Heartsick, John turned away and tried not to listen to his sons— _his sons_ , men he had clearly raised to be strong warriors who honored their family, strong and clever and brave, the hunting insanity notwithstanding—pleading with their mother to ensure that they were never born. Why would anyone—

“Listen,” Sam was saying, “you think you can have that normal life that you want so bad, but you can’t. I’m sorry. It’s all gonna go rotten. You are gonna die, and your children will be cursed.”

Oh, gods, what had they gotten into?

Mary was stubborn, though. “There has to be a way.”

“No,” said Dean. “This is the way. Leave John.”

“I can’t.”

“This is bigger than us. There are so many more lives at stake.”

“You don’t understand. _I. Can’t._ It’s too late. I’m....”

Mary paused, and John had to stop himself from turning back to see what was going on in that silence. But it felt like an eternity before she finally dropped the bombshell:

“I’m pregnant.”

Torn between ecstasy and terror, John turned—and terror won out as he saw what had become of his handiwork. _Get a grip, Marine_ , he told himself and hurried in to alert the rest of his family that the sigils were gone.

Not ten seconds later, the lights started flashing as an ear-piercing whine began to build from somewhere, and Sam drew the silver sword. The windows shattered. A _Zhini_ calling himself Uriel walked in, followed by _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ ; Sam shoved Mary behind him as he and Dean moved into a defensive position... and chaos broke out. John almost couldn’t keep up with who was doing what where. He did see Sam drop the sword, but before John could pick it up, _Bitsii’ łichxíí_ punched him in the chest, knocking him through the window and down the hill and rendering him unconscious briefly. When he came to, it felt like there might be enough damage to his ribs, heart, and lungs that he wouldn’t recover. It was all he could do not to panic.

But then he saw a light—no, not a light, an honest-to-goodness _yei_.

 _My name is Who-Is-Like-Diyin-God_ , the yei spoke into John’s mind in _Diné bizaad_ , which shouldn’t have startled John as much as it did _. I am able to save your wife. But I must enter your body to do so. Will you let me?_

John was too dazed to say anything but yes. And then the light overwhelmed him, and he knew no more.

* * *

John woke in his own bed the next morning with Mary beside him, but he was totally disoriented. So was she. Neither of them could remember a thing that had happened from the time John had gotten home from work the night before.

“Something happened, though,” John mused, “something important—something... something you wanted to tell me?”

Mary blushed and bit her lip. “Well, it’s a little soon to be completely sure....”

He blinked. “Be sure of what?”

“I’m pregnant.”

John’s expression of glee at this news was cut short by the telephone ringing. It was Mike.

“John? Where the hell are you, man?”

“At home, genius. I’ve only got one phone number.” John glanced at the clock then and confirmed that he wasn’t late for work yet; why was Mike so anxious?

“You been home all night?”

John frowned. “I... think so. Why?”

“Old Man Woodsen’s dead. Probably a heart attack, but the ME says his eyes were burned out. There’s a stolen car outside, and there are signs of one hell of a struggle inside—windshields smashed, shelves knocked over, tire iron looks like it was used to stab someone. Only the one body, though. Oh, yeah, and some weird symbol on one of the walls; investigator thinks it’s drawn in human blood. Think we’re gonna have to paint over it so it doesn’t rust....”

John’s heart raced, though he didn’t know why. “Do the police have any suspects?”

“Not yet, but you and I are in the clear. Fingerprints in the stolen car match the handprint that’s in the middle of the symbol, and preliminary tests on the blood on the tire iron came back with some weird type that matches a Jane Doe who was brought into the hospital a couple of days ago and disappeared last night.”

“Wait, preliminary tests? How long have you been there?”

“Since 5-ish. Paper boy walked by, saw the mess, called it in. I called you _five times_ this morning, Chief.”

John sighed. “Sorry, man—I never heard the phone ring. Mary and I were both out cold.”

A beat passed before Mike asked, “This isn’t another ‘family emergency,’ is it?”

“ _No_ , you idiot. Look, give me fifteen, and I’ll pick up some doughnuts and coffee from Jay Bird’s on my way in.”

“Okay. Sorry, I just....”

“You’re stressed. It’s okay, man. See you in fifteen.”

“Sure. Thanks, Chief.”

“John?” Mary asked as he hung up the phone. “ _Haidzaa?_ ”

John summarized what Mike had just told him. “You’re sure you don’t remember us going to the garage last night?”

Mary shook her head. “Why would we?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I dreamed it—I have weird dreams sometimes.” Then he kissed her cheek, threw on work clothes, and headed out to the Impala.

It wasn’t until he was pulling out of the driveway that he noticed that the car had somehow lost half a tank of gas and gained about 100 miles on the odometer overnight, but there was no evidence that anyone other than John himself had driven it. John was too spooked to share that tidbit with anyone but Mary, who didn’t know what to make of it, either.

* * *

The day after the funeral, Mike got a call from Mr. Woodsen’s attorney; the old man had apparently had some kind of premonition and left the garage to Mike in his will. Mike wasted no time in having the attorney help him restructure the company to make John a full partner, and it was Kate who suggested that, after a decent interval, they rename Woodsen’s Garage to Guenther & Winchester. John drew the line at allowing any kind of ‘tribal’ symbol on the new sign, however; he preferred for new customers to judge his work on its merits, not to choose him for being hip or to avoid him for being Indian.

Then, a few days after the incident, John and Mary got a letter from John’s parents. Amá Sání Chee had had a nightmare—the kind that came with a migraine and usually came true in some fashion.

 _She said she saw two men riding across the land on a great black horse_ , Joe wrote. _They had green eyes and brown hair, and she was sure that they were your sons. Their chests were marked with a five-pointed star in a sunburst. A weakened yei and a crippled Bilagáana followed them, and all around them yeii and chindí were fighting, sometimes for them, sometimes against them. The sky grew dark, and lightning flashed across it from east to west. And between them, the men carried a basket that held a horned badger._

John thought it was nonsense, but Mary said, “The lightning flash and the badger—those are omens, right?”

John shrugged. “They’re supposed to be signs of the end of the world.”

Mary hummed thoughtfully and wrote it all down in her journal.

* * *

The months passed quickly once they knew for sure that Mary was pregnant. Mary quit her job, and John found a three-bedroom house that they were able to buy with Mary’s inheritance. Once they were moved in and had set up the nursery, Mary surprised John by picking up a cheesy little angel figurine at a garage sale and setting it above the crib; somehow she’d gotten the notion that angels were watching over their child, but John didn’t have the heart to tell her that after ’Nam, he didn’t think angels were any more reliable than the Holy People had been. And now that he was a full partner at the garage, John found himself with more work than he knew what to do with, which quashed his hope of being able to stay in Dinétah long enough after the holidays for the baby to be born there.

Mary was hoping for a girl, Deanna Emily. John was hoping for a boy, though he couldn’t settle on a name; Samuel Joseph was one of the better combinations he came up with, but somehow it didn’t feel right for this child. Finally, at some point during their Christmas visit to Dinétah, Mary suggested Dean Iain, and John liked the idea. So did Amá Sání.

Robert Campbell had been only mildly congratulatory when Mary told him that she was expecting, but the Chees were overjoyed, and Emily Winchester and Sarah Chee insisted on coming to Lawrence to help Mary once the baby was born. Amá Sání wanted to come, too, but Uncle Ron persuaded her that there was too much to do on the ranch for all three women to be gone at once. Where things got awkward was with Amá Sání’s desire to have a Blessing Way for John and Mary, since the singer whom the family preferred was getting too old to travel all the way to eastern Kansas and Mary was concerned that no one in Lawrence would be willing to attend. Finally, Amá Sání suggested the compromise of holding the Blessing Way over... the Impala.

“ _’Akonee’_ ,” she said when John objected that it wasn’t their house. “As much time as you spend on the _chidí bi’tiin_ coming back and forth to us, that _chidí_ needs blessing just as much as a hooghan does, especially now that you’ll have a child with you.”

John knew better than to argue, and they went ahead with it. And the smile the ceremony put on Mary’s face made the whole thing worthwhile.

It was just as well that the Winchesters had to head back to Lawrence shortly after New Year’s, however, because January of 1979 was bitterly cold throughout the Midwest and Southwest, and despite having a built-in furnace, Mary was much happier to spend the last three weeks of her pregnancy in a house that had central heating. Emily and Aunt Sarah were especially looking forward to not having to tend the fire for a while, and the three of them spent most of the holidays chattering happily about meals and other practical plans for welcoming the baby to the world.

In the end, Mary’s water broke just moments after the Chee women arrived on the 24th, so John had very little to do for her other than driving the family to the hospital. He wasn’t allowed in the delivery room, either, so he found himself pacing in the waiting area until the doctor called him into the recovery room and placed a tiny warm bundle in his arms. It squirmed and made a squeaky little noise.

“John,” said the doctor, “I’d like to introduce you to your son, Dean.”

And as John stared in wonder at his baby boy, a distant echo of a proud voice stole through his memory— _Shizhé’é yéé ho’ałtsosįįh yínaashineeztą́ą́_....

“Everything, _shiye’_ ,” he whispered. “I’ll teach you everything I know. I promise.”


	3. Naayéé’ Neizgháníi doo Na’ídígishí

Fatherhood brought with it a host of challenges that John was totally unprepared for, but Mary was a natural at being a mother, and little Dean brought even more joy and laughter to their house. He was so smart it was almost scary, absorbing everything John and Mary taught him like a sponge, and he quickly became as fluent as any child in both English and _Diné bizaad_ , which Mary hadn’t had to push John much to teach him. And though Dean could be strong-willed and full of mischief, he was as good a child as any parent could ask for, happy, healthy, loving, eager to please, eager to help as soon as he was old enough to toddle around the house after them. After Mary, Dean was the light of John’s life.

Almost before John knew it, Dean was three and Mary was calling them into the living room one late September afternoon with an excited glow to her face. “Dean,” she said, bending down to look him in the eye, “how would you like a little brother or sister?”

Dean bit his lip as he considered. “I’d rather have a brother,” he replied seriously.

“Well, I can’t promise that it won’t be a sister, but either way... you’ll be getting one sometime in May.”

Dean’s eyes and mouth got even rounder than they had back in August when Joe showed Dean the foal he’d chosen as the boy’s late birthday gift, and then he let out an ear-piercing squeal and threw his arms around Mary’s neck. Mary laughed and picked him up, and John pulled them both into a sandwich hug. John had been an only child and would have been content with only Dean, but Amá Sání seemed convinced he’d have at least two sons, and John was too happy about the news to be nervous over the possibility of raising two boys. With Mary at his side, he could do anything.

There were complications, though. Mary had gestational diabetes, and the OB-GYN was worried that her blood pressure would get too high and that she’d have preeclampsia. The hand-trembler back home didn’t sense anything particularly wrong, but Amá Sání insisted on holding a Blessing Way over the Impala again that Christmas, and Joe and Emily came up to help out in late April. They hadn’t expected the baby to come before May 15, but Mary went into labor two weeks early.

Samuel Joseph Winchester was born on May 2, 1983, and though mother and son were perfectly healthy and little Sammy seemed like a happy baby, John couldn’t shake the fear that things wouldn’t stay that way. And so it proved.

After Joe and Emily went home, Mary fell into a deep depression, which worried John and Dean no end. Not even Dean’s tee-ball games could tempt her out of the house, and she ate only because she was nursing and wouldn’t let Sammy suffer. Kate tried to get her to go to a psychiatrist, but Mary refused, saying that most psychiatrists wouldn’t accept the spiritual concerns she had. Finally, at his wit’s end, John wrote to his father at the beginning of June.

 _Bring her home_ , Joe wrote back. _We’ll hold a_ _Nidáá_.

John scoffed, but Mary brightened a little and said, “Yes, I think I’d like that.”

So John took two weeks off, gave his apologies to the tee-ball coach, and took the family back to Arizona. The hand-trembler insisted that Mary keep Sammy with her throughout the whole thing, so she did. Mary never did tell John exactly what was wrong, and the prayers she said during the ceremony were all in Latin, but as unorthodox as the event was, it seemed to help. Mary regained her usual cheerfulness, and for weeks Dean would talk of nothing else but the music and the dancing. His excitement over the experience trumped even the fact that his tee-ball team won every game they played after the Winchesters got home.

But then one day Dean came home from a neighbor’s house crying because the other boy, whom Dean had considered a friend, had said, “Shut up, Injun. Nobody cares.”

John was furious, and before Mary could stop him, he stormed over to the neighbor kid’s house and told his parents in no uncertain terms precisely how offensive their son’s language was. The two fathers almost came to blows over it and concluded that their sons were forbidden from playing with each other from then on.

“Good,” the little snot said once the door was closed, as if John couldn’t hear him. “I didn’t like Dean anyway. He’s a stupid half-breed, and he talks funny.”

John had to force himself to walk away. And he was not in the mood to be civil when he got home and Mary immediately started nagging him about “You can’t solve your problems this way, John” and so on. They shouted at each other for a good five minutes before John walked out and drove to Mike and Kate’s.

It was three days before they’d both calmed down enough for John to come home. But Dean refused to speak anything but English for the rest of the summer, and he never mentioned the Enemy Way to his friends again. John and Mary fought about that, too, among other things, and John wound up on Mike and Kate’s couch two or three more times before the end of October.

John’s disappointment that Dean didn’t want to be an Indian for Halloween that year was mitigated only by the fact that he wanted to be Templeton Peck instead and laughed when John gave him grief about wanting to be a Green Beret rather than a Marine. He chose not to think about the fact that “Faceman” was an orphan; Dean wasn’t old enough to try to make some sort of statement about John and Mary’s relationship that way.

But Halloween came and went, and on November 2 John and Mary were back on good terms, and Dean was happily alternating between English and _Diné bizaad_ and telling Sammy all the things they’d do together when Sammy was old enough to tag along. All told, it was a lovely, normal, happy day, at the end of which John and Mary together put Sammy and Dean to bed before going back down to the living room to watch _The Longest Day_. Somehow, John managed to doze off in the middle of it and missed Mary going to bed.

The blowing of the roadblock on Omaha Beach at the end of the movie woke John, and he turned off the TV and headed upstairs to go to bed for real. But he stopped to check on Sammy on his way, since there seemed to be something especially sulfide-smelly in the nursery. Sammy appeared to be sleeping happily, and his diaper was dry... but there was a drop of blood on his cheek.

Then there was another.

And John looked up to see Mary pinned on the ceiling, her midsection sliced open, seconds before she was engulfed in flames.

John’s scream brought Dean running, which in turn snapped John into action; he shoved Sammy into Dean’s arms and told the boy to run outside while John tried desperately to get to Mary, to pull her off the ceiling. But the fire was too strong, too persistent, too malevolent, and it wasn’t long before John had no choice but to flee for his own life before the house could burn down.

As he and his sons huddled on the hood of the Impala, watching the firemen try to fight the fire that seemed to have a will of its own or to be directed by a will that reveled in destruction, John fancied he could feel the sacred music of the Blessing Way still thrumming through the metal of the only hooghan he had left, giving what little comfort such a sanctuary could provide.

Mike and Kate showed up shortly before the last of the fire trucks left and insisted that John and the boys come and stay with them for the time being. John barely managed to pull himself together well enough to follow them and to call Robert Campbell to handle the arrangements. Taboos or no, there were some things even a Marine couldn’t face. And John knew he couldn’t deal with Mary’s white friends and relations, with the kind of farce a church funeral was sure to be. It was going to be hard enough to tell his parents and the Chees—so much so, in fact, that he could neither draft a telegram himself nor allow Mike to do it for him.

There was no body to recover, the police told John the next day, though the arson investigator had identified human remains among the ashes, and very little else on the second floor survived; all the papers in the bedroom safe were destroyed, and what furniture remained downstairs was so badly smoke-damaged that it probably couldn’t be salvaged. When John insisted that the arson investigator was wrong about the fire’s point of origin, however, the detective who was talking to him simply gave him a pitying look and told him the case was closed.

The Campbells were no help, either. Uncle Robert and Uncle Ed almost seemed angry with John when they stopped by Mike and Kate’s house to talk to him about the funeral and literally looked down their noses at Dean, who had greeted them with a barely audible “ _Yáát’ééh_ ” and hadn’t said another word, and Sammy, who was fussy and would not be quiet for anyone but John or Dean. They allowed that something unnatural could have happened to Mary, but the way they spoke made it sound as if _John_ had attracted that danger to her, and they definitely acted resentful that John refused to participate in the funeral.

“She was a Campbell,” John argued. “Let her rest with her own clan in Greenville, and let your people see to it. But don’t ask me to invite her to haunt us by flaunting our grief.”

Uncle Ed looked sour, but Uncle Robert nodded slowly. “Okay, Winchester. Keep your taboos. Go back to your people if you want. Just don’t bring any more deaths into _our_ family, and don’t expect any help from us when it comes to explaining to your sons what happened to their mother.”

That night, for the first time since he’d come to Lawrence eleven years earlier, John went to a bar and got blind drunk before Mike tracked him down and dragged him home. And the one man to make a wisecrack about Indians and firewater in John’s hearing left with a broken nose.

* * *

“Just go back to the reservation, will you?” one policeman finally sneered after two weeks of John’s fruitless entreaties for the case to be reopened. “Maybe your medicine man can spin you a fairy tale to make you feel better.”

His superior rebuked him immediately, but the damage was done. John stormed out and decided to seek out the truth himself.

He got as far as the grocery store when the depression caught up with him again, and he was seriously contemplating buying a case of Jack Daniels when a buxom _Zhini_ woman bumped into him and paused in the middle of her apology, her eyes going round with horror as she studied his face. “Oh, _honey_ ,” she said quietly. “I am so, _so_ sorry for your loss. My stars—losin’ your wife like _that_ , no wonder you’re wantin’ to drink yourself stupid.” At John’s frown, she continued, “My name’s Missouri Mosely. I’m a psychic. Not that I need to be to see how you’re hurtin’, but the why... I do believe you’re right. Something killed Mary, something bad. But your boys need you sober, and if you want the truth, you’re gonna need all your wits about you to find it.”

John’s frown deepened. “You must have read about the fire in the paper.”

“Well, I did, but there’s no way I would have recognized you as John Winchester just from that description. The paper never said anything about you being... what? Navajo.” She shook her head sadly. “And now your Dean won’t even speak English anymore? Child, you need answers. You all do.”

John studied her face in return and saw something in it akin to the wiser hand-tremblers and singers he had known. He didn’t completely believe that she could read minds, but he didn’t think she could have picked up the fact that Dean was bilingual from the newspaper reports of the fire or from Mary’s obituary. “What can you do?”

“Take me to the house. You don’t have to come in—Lord knows, your people have taboos for a reason—but if your wife died of supernatural causes, I should be able to sense it.”

John had his doubts, but it wouldn’t hurt, so he nodded. “Follow me, then.”

Missouri stopped long enough to pick up some Peanut M&Ms and a sugary soda—a precaution in case the reading left her hypoglycemic, she informed him—and then followed John to the Impala, commented on the positive energy lingering around it because of the Blessing Way, and followed him in her own car to a point a few blocks from the house. From there John gave her directions, and she walked to the house.

Ten minutes later, she stumbled back to her own car and drank half of the soda in one gulp. “Mercy,” she was whispering when John walked up to her. “Mercy, mercy. That was awful.”

“You found something?”

Missouri nodded. “It’s a good thing I’d seen your memories of the fire before I got over there. I know it’s been two weeks, but the sense of that evil... _mm._ ” She drank the rest of the soda and tore into the M&Ms, eating a couple of handfuls in quick succession before she continued. “Yes. Something killed your wife. Pinned her to the ceiling of your son’s nursery and burned her to death, just like you saw.”

John swallowed hard. “What was it?”

“I don’t know for sure, honey,” Missouri said sadly. “I’ve never felt anything like this one before. But I think... I think your people call them _chindí_.”

“ _’Áhóódin_ ,” John snapped.

“Oh, yes, they do exist. Demons, ghosts, werewolves... every bad thing your people ever heard of and a lot that they haven’t. I don’t know what killed your wife, but I do know it wasn’t a man. And whatever it was, it was _bad_. Powerful. Terrible.” She paused. “It’s gone, though—I mean, it didn’t stay after it killed her. There’s just an echo now.”

A long-forgotten memory surfaced then. “Do... do you think this had something to do with her family’s business?”

Missouri studied him for a moment. “So the Campbells were hunters,” she murmured. “Yes, that could be.” At John’s frown, she explained, “You know the old story of Monster Slayer? Well, there’s folks who still do that today. They’re called hunters. I don’t know too many of ’em myself, but I know a few, and I do know they do a lot of good killing monsters and sending away evil spirits. Save a lot of lives. If your Mary was a hunter, could be she tangled with the wrong spirit once.”

“But she was out of it for _ten years_. And we just had an Enemy Way back in June.”

“Spirit this strong, probably has a long memory. Not that easy to drive away.”

“And why was it in Sammy’s bedroom?”

“That I don’t know.”

Suddenly all that mattered was getting his boys to Dinétah, to family and sacred ground. He thanked Missouri, rushed back to Mike and Kate’s and packed, told Mike he could have John’s half of the garage, assured a wide-eyed Dean that everything was okay as he bundled the boys into the car, and took off.

It was hard not to think about all the times they’d made this trip over the last ten years, especially that first desperate drive when he and Mary had run from death, much like he was running from it now (and Carter-erected speed limits be damned, he was driving 70 as long as he could get away with it). But he wondered... the sulfur, the yellow eyes, Mary’s panicked call and her plea for him to take her away, now, hurry... were they dealing with the same thing that had killed Mary’s parents? Or had he imagined the whole thing? His memories of the attack in ’73 were so fuzzy that he couldn’t be sure, but the question dogged him for a thousand miles.

As soon as they were within range, John radioed his parents to let them know he was coming. But he couldn’t tell them what had happened yet, not when he knew that everyone for fifty miles could overhear. Joe seemed to understand and didn’t press, just promised he’d have beds ready for everyone when they arrived.

Once he did explain what had happened, however, Amá Sání ran back to her hooghan and brought back a covered basket decorated with sacred symbols of protection, one that she must have woven specially herself. “Mary gave me these things last Christmas for safe keeping,” she explained, handing the basket to John. “She said she thought they might be stolen or destroyed if she kept them in Lawrence, and if anything happened to her that couldn’t be explained and if you couldn’t live without answers, I was to give them to you. I have not looked at them.”

Puzzled, John opened the basket and gasped when he saw Mary’s journals. “I thought these were in the safe—I thought they burned.” He forced himself not to cry as he looked up. “ _Ahéhee’, shimásání_.”

Just to be safe, he waited to read them until he had found a sheltered spot on a mountainside, still within sight of the family hooghan but distant enough that no one could bother him or blame him for bringing the spirit’s attention to them. And then he went out there to read every day except when the boys needed him. What he read... well, it ought to be a horror novel, except that it was in Mary’s handwriting and he was reading it because something had burned her to death on the ceiling of the nursery. By the time he reached the ’70s, shortly before Christmas, he could hardly absorb what he was reading and just skimmed for any key words that stood out as possibly being important. But some of the entries were so smudged as to be unreadable, as if someone had taken a wet sponge to them, and later entries lamented that Mary couldn’t remember what they’d said because she felt sure they were important, something she needed to do or not do.

When he looked back over the smudged entries, John couldn’t help noticing that they began shortly before the night her parents died and ended after that night they couldn’t remember in ’78, the night Mr. Woodsen turned up dead at the garage and the Impala suddenly had more miles on it than it should have. The night before Mary told him she was pregnant with Dean. What had blocked those memories, and why?

So he started over with the first smudged entry, which seemed to be about a hunt that took place on May 1, 1973: _Charlie Whitshire says the man had yellow eyes._ [smear] _,_ _but Dad’s never heard of a demon having yellow eyes before, and he’s so sure he’s right_ [smear] _. I just don’t understand why Dad’s dragging me along on this case; he knows I want out. Maybe he thinks he’ll prove his point about John being a civilian—or maybe he really does hate John because he’s Navajo. In any case, I think John’s going to propose soon, and I intend to say yes—_ [long smear that probably covered several sentences]

Whitshire... the name brought back vague memories of a news story: a man’s body was found badly mangled by his own tractor, even though he’d had no reason for being out in that particular field that day. The bit about a man with yellow eyes made John frown, too; apparently that hadn’t just been his own imagination. So he kept reading.

_May 9. It’s over._

_Somehow_ [smudge] _found out the yellow-eyed demon would be at Liddy Walsh’s place on the 2 nd. Dad told me, and we took off to try to deal with it—but it left its host before _[smudge] _could shoot it._

_ And it said it liked me. _

_As soon as I could, I called John to come get me. He drove me out to Elton Ridge and tried to propose. I have no idea exactly what happened while we were on the road, but the yellow-eyed demon possessed Dad and stabbed him, killed Mom, and then showed up at Elton Ridge. It pulled me out of the car, and when John got out to reason with it, it broke his neck. And then it offered me a deal: it would bring John back and let me leave hunting if I gave it permission to enter my house in ten years’ time for... something. It wouldn’t say what, but it swore it didn’t want my soul. It said that as long as it wasn’t interrupted, no one would get hurt._

_May God forgive me—I made the deal. I just couldn’t face a future without John._

John stopped reading there, his hand going instinctively to the back of his neck. He hadn’t imagined it. He’d actually died. And because she couldn’t live without him, Mary had made a deal with a creature of such rare evil that her father, the master hunter, hadn’t believed it existed.

Ten years to the day after her parents died, Sammy had been born.

Well, that explained Mary’s depression, but if the same thing did kill Mary as killed her parents, why had it returned to Sammy’s nursery six months later? It should have been able to get what it wanted without fear of interruption, since the whole family had been at the hospital that night...

... unless what it wanted was a child who was exactly six months old.

John tucked the journal back into the basket and began to pace as he thought. The Campbells were hunters, but Robert and Ed Campbell seemed more inclined to blame John for Mary’s death than to give him any help in tracking down whatever this thing was. And if Samuel hadn’t believed a demon could have yellow eyes, they probably wouldn’t believe John, either. What he wouldn’t give for those smudges to be undone so he could learn what they hid! He guessed that some other hunter had been there that night, but without a name, that lead was also a dead end. And he didn’t know anyone else.

Missouri knew a few hunters, though. And she seemed willing to help.

So John raced back to his parents’ hooghan and wrote to Missouri, explaining what he’d learned and what he suspected, then sped all the way to Tuba City to send the letter by priority mail. Four days later, while John was outside attempting to play catch with a withdrawn Dean, a strange truck pulled up outside the Winchester hooghan, and a white man in a down-filled vest and a gimme cap stepped out.

“You John Winchester?” the stranger asked.

“Who’s asking?” John replied warily.

The stranger reached into a pocket of his vest and pulled out John’s letter. “Name’s Bobby Singer. I’m a hunter. Missouri sent me.”

 _Singer_. John didn’t know what that name meant to a _Bilagáana_ , but to the _Diné_ a singer was what the Plains nations called a medicine man. The fact that Missouri would send him a hunter who was also a singer gave him hope that he’d get some real answers soon—and that he’d learn what he had to do to avenge Mary, to protect his boys, and to prevent anyone else from suffering the same fate as the victims he’d read about in Mary’s journals.

He’d had enough of deaths he could have prevented with the right knowledge. He’d do whatever it took to stop as many other deaths as he could.

“Dean,” John said, “ _hooghan góne’ ninááh_. Mr. Singer, would you come with me, please? We may want some privacy....”

* * *

Bobby didn’t have much to offer regarding the thing that killed Mary. There was no record of a demon with yellow eyes, and the other clues all pointed to a high-level demon like Lilith or Azazel, but none of those had been heard from in so long that many hunters believed them to be trapped in Hell, dead, or just flat mythical. Bobby wasn’t willing to rule anything out, and neither was John, because both Lilith and Azazel would presumably fit Missouri’s description of the echo in the house; but for the time being, they didn’t have much at all to go on. The trail of omens, such as it was, had vanished.

That said, Bobby saw something in John that marked him as a good hunter. So he explained exactly what it was hunters did, how taking out monsters might help him find answers and make the world safer for his boys, and how he might be able to save others’ lives by hunting. John agreed that it was worth trying, even if the family didn’t approve, and Bobby offered to teach him everything he knew. Immediately after New Year’s, therefore, John loaded the boys into the Impala and followed Bobby back to his salvage yard in South Dakota to start training for his third career. Amá Sání had been a little skittish around Bobby at first, though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why, but by the time they left, she was at least willing to grant that he knew things about the spirit world that could help John in his quest.

The first time Bobby told him how to get rid of a ghost, however, John balked. The man _was_ a singer, by name and by calling, but the _Diné_ had very firm opinions on dealing with the dead. Disturbing a grave....

“The spirit’s _already_ disturbed, you idjit,” Bobby said gruffly but not unkindly. “And it ain’t gonna leave just ’cause you tell it to, even with the Enemy Way. A salt-and-burn is the only option.”

John still hesitated when a job came up, so Bobby made him stand guard with the shotgun once they got to the cemetery. The ghost was tied to the house, they thought, but that was no guarantee that it wouldn’t show up to try to stop Bobby from doing whatever it was that he did. And guard duty gave John an excuse for not looking at the grave.

In fact, the ghost did show up. John shot it the first time out of pure instinct and was stunned that the salt round actually sent it away. After that he shot it twice more, but the fourth time it appeared, Bobby was out of the grave and John heard the _whompf_ of lighter fluid igniting behind him. The spirit screamed and went up in flames.

“It’s gone, Winchester,” Bobby assured him, but John was still too shaken to help him fill the grave in again.

The second ghost was a poltergeist tied to a book. That one John could do on his own, he and Bobby agreed, and it worked. The third, a hunt with Bill Harvelle, went very sideways; the ghost threw Bill into a tombstone head-first before he got the coffin open, so John had no choice but to finish the job himself and then drag Bill back to the motel to patch him up. Afterward, once Bill was safely back in Nebraska with his wife Ellen, John fled with the boys to Blue Earth, Minnesota, and hid in the sanctuary of Jim Murphy’s church for four days until the hunter-pastor proved that nothing had come after him.

His father had been right; Mary didn’t belong in this line of work.

John almost didn’t have the nerve to go through with the fourth ghost hunt. But Bobby called his friends Rufus and Caleb, and the four of them together went to the graveyard to dispatch the spirit. At Bobby’s insistence, however, John did all the work while the other men stood guard. “I know it ain’t what you’ve been taught,” said Bobby, “but if you’re gonna hunt, you’ve gotta be prepared to take out _anything_ you find, even if it’s already dead. Especially if it’s already dead.”

It was an old ghost that had killed ten people in the last year alone, and it was a racist; its first target at the graveside was Rufus, who shot it before it could do more than force him backward a step. Then it spotted John and started screaming slurs even Bobby had never heard before. Somehow that angered John enough to finish the digging and pour the salt and lighter fluid over the bones, and he felt a fierce satisfaction at the terror on the ghost’s face when he tossed the match into the grave and at the scream the thing gave as the fire sent it to the Burning-Pitch-Place.

As the other men slapped him on the back and escorted him back to the car for a beer while they waited for the fire to burn out, something deep down clicked back into place, something that had been irritatingly loose since he’d returned from Vietnam and worse since Mary’s death. He knew at last where he belonged, who he was as a _Diné_ warrior, what it meant to be of the Campbell Clan of Lawrence, Kansas.

Saving people, hunting things. The family business.

He could do this.


	4. Kin Dóone’é Áshį́

On finding a job in Gatewood, Missouri, which was equidistant from three or four potential hunts and would make a good home base for the time being, John stipulated that he needed to start on a Tuesday so he’d be home in case of breakdowns caused by Dean’s first day of kindergarten. The grandfatherly garage owner agreed and told John that he appreciated his honesty; “most of the Injuns I’ve hired just show up when they feel like it.”

“I’m a Marine,” John said flatly, and his boss shrugged.

So John waited in the hall with Sammy, just to make sure Dean was settling in okay, while the teacher, who looked to be in her late twenties, introduced herself to the kids and had each child introduce himself or herself to the others. Most just said something like, “Hi, I’m Susie”; a couple of them mumbled so badly that the teacher had to prompt them to speak up.

When it was his turn, Dean stood and said clearly, “Dean Winchester _yinishyé_. _Dóone’é Campbell ei’ nishli, Ashiihi bá shíshchíín_.”

Miss Thistlewaite blinked. “I’m sorry, Dean... could you say that in English, please? We didn’t understand you.”

Dean looked her in the eye and sat down.

“De!” cried Sammy, which caught the teacher’s attention. She excused herself from the class and stepped out into the hall as the brothers waved to each other, closing the door behind her.

“Are you Dean’s father?”

“Yes,” John nodded. “I’m sorry about that—we’ve been spending a lot of time with my family in Arizona since my wife died, and he’s gotten out of the habit of speaking English.”

“I see,” said Miss Thistlewaite, though she clearly didn’t, because her next sentence was, “Well, I’m afraid I don’t speak Japanese, so....”

John frowned. “We’re Navajo.”

She blushed. “I’m sorry. Obviously I don’t speak Navajo either.”

“I’ll talk to him after school,” John promised.

She didn’t look pleased at the prospect of having to deal with a non-English-speaking child for even one day, but she thanked him and turned to go back inside. When she got to the door, however, she turned back. “Forgive me for asking, but... how long has your family been in the States?”

“Longer than yours,” John deadpanned and left, ignoring Sammy’s fussing over being separated from Dean.

“School is stupid,” Dean groused in _Diné bizaad_ when he climbed into the Impala that afternoon. “All we do is color and talk about letters and numbers, and then we play. I can do that at home. Woman-with-Thistle-for-Brain still thinks we’re Japanese. And everyone looks at me like _I’m_ the one who’s stupid.”

John sighed. “Dean, we’re not on the ranch anymore. You’re going to have to speak English, at least at school.”

Dean remained sullenly silent for the rest of the day, but the next morning he did agree to speak English at school and reserve _Diné_ _bizaad_ for sarcastic commentary that he didn’t want others to understand. And Miss Thistlewaite was baffled by the fact that not only was his English fluent, he was already reading at a third-grade level. He then made a point of reading library books about American Indians, especially Navajos, until they moved away in mid-November. She never got the hint, and Dean never stopped calling her Miss Thistle-brain in either language behind her back.

* * *

Tony Hillerman might or might not be a good writer. John didn’t know because he hadn’t read Hillerman’s books; he didn’t read novels all that often, and mysteries were considerably lower on his scale of interest than books of hunting lore. But on one point he owed the man a debt of gratitude: for a certain subset of the public imagination, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn made a Navajo with a badge not only plausible, but respectable. Some of the other hunters were astounded at the ease with which “Do you read Tony Hillerman?” defrosted individuals who were skeptical of FBI Agent Yazzie or NCIS Special Agent Whitehorse or whatever John’s federal cover identity of the day happened to be.

Unfortunately, it only worked when people recognized him as an Indian. John knew some people would probably mistake him for a Latino if he used a Spanish surname, so he never did unless he _wanted_ to pass for Latino, but he wasn’t prepared for some of the other confusions he encountered. Some were just funny, like the “Where in India are you from?” question he got once in Atlanta. But “Special Agent Tso,” despite wearing a bolo tie with a turquoise slide, was asked how to make “that chicken stuff”; “Agent Kiyaani” got “Get outta here, ya damn Jap” in Fayetteville, Arkansas; and “Father Chee,” ironically, once ran into a victim anxious for someone to help him practice his Cantonese.

“Do I _really_ look Asian?!” he asked Ellen Harvelle after that one.

“Not to anyone with half a brain,” Ellen shrugged. “Unfortunately, there are too many people in this world who _don’t_ have half a brain.”

Given the number of towns in which it was easier for John to play drunk and hustle pool than to get a job as a mechanic, even when he gave his name as Diego Vega, he had to agree.

* * *

If there was one thing that annoyed John about being a father, it was other people’s notions of good parenting. Emily Winchester and Amá Sání Chee started Dean on a traditional training regimen the day after his sixth birthday, and John attempted to continue it in the next town where they moved for a hunt, only to have a nosy neighbor call Child Protective Services on him. John hadn’t laid a hand on Dean in punishment, and “That’s the way we do it on the rez” actually worked in this case; but Bobby recommended that John have Dean do most of his exercising indoors unless the weather was pleasant so the neighbors would be less likely to call CPS again. It didn’t always help, though, so John had to have a ready supply of excuses in case someone decided that Dean’s morning mile was a sign of abuse.

Oddly enough, no one seemed to mind John teaching Dean to shoot except when they were in New England or southern California.

School was a problem, too. Fights were one thing, but there were activities many schools expected John to be involved in that he just didn’t have time for, between hunting and training Dean and doing non-school stuff with both boys, and somehow that got him labeled as neglectful. He tried explaining that he didn’t _need_ to help Dean with his homework, that Dean was bright enough to figure it out on his own, that maybe the problem was that Dean was bored with material that didn’t challenge him and that he’d never need in real life, but his arguments almost always fell on deaf ears. One rare school actually had a Gifted and Talented program where Dean thrived, and John hated to pull him away from it; it just figured that that case _would_ be one that went sideways enough to catch the FBI’s attention, necessitating a quick exit from the state.

The “We think your son’s dyslexic” call he got when Dean was in the third grade was a new one, though, especially since it came when Dean was in the middle of reading _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ for pleasure. The school administrators seemed to view minorities as People Who Need Our Enlightened Help And Ought To Be Grateful We Care, an attitude that had annoyed John from the first time he’d encountered it in the reservation schools; they weren’t pleased when John explained that he couldn’t afford and didn’t want the expensive battery of tests needed to diagnose dyslexia, and they weren’t amused when Dean couldn’t explain himself in English, John couldn’t translate what Dean did say, and Sammy refused to translate on the grounds that the whole thing was stupid and that Dean had been reading to him for forever. The fact that John had opted to delay Sammy’s enrollment in kindergarten for a year seemed to invalidate the boy’s opinion, even though he was the most articulate Winchester in the room.

“Dean could be mildly dyslexic,” Pastor Jim allowed when John called him that night for advice. “I’ve known him to get letters and numbers switched. But if I had to guess, I’d say the school’s more anxious for the special education funding than they are for Dean’s academic future—or Sam’s, for that matter.”

A few discreet questions around town confirmed Pastor Jim’s fear, and that school disappeared in the Impala’s rearview mirror not long after.

* * *

Technically, English was John’s second language; _Diné bizaad_ was his first. But after so many years off the reservation, the distinction didn’t matter for him any more than it did for his boys. He’d picked up some Spanish, too, and he’d learned a few useful phrases in Thai and Vietnamese in the Corps. But he’d never given serious thought to learning another language until he started hunting and kept having to call Bobby or Pastor Jim to translate reference books for him. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Ugaritic... the sheer number of old languages made his head hurt, never mind the number of alphabets. And that didn’t include the modern languages like French, German, and Japanese.

Mary had insisted on raising the boys bilingual, and John had done so, though Sammy seldom spoke Navajo except when they were in Arizona for the holidays. But Dean never had any interest in learning a third language beyond memorizing Latin exorcisms. Sammy, on the other hand, pestered Bobby and Pastor Jim to teach him every language they possibly could, and John repaid them by translating any _Diné bizaad_ texts they ran across.

Then Sammy discovered Scots Gaelic, and somehow it caught Dean’s interest as well. John went away on a hunt for two weeks, and when he got back, they were speaking Gaelic to each other almost as fluently as they did _Diné bizaad_. He was happy they’d recovered a bit of Mary’s heritage that way, but listening to them chatter in a language he didn’t understand... it made him wonder when he’d become the outsider in his own family.

They confused him, his boys. Some of the differences between them could be put down to the notion of multiple intelligences, according to Pastor Jim, even if the problems didn’t quite make sense to John. Sammy always complained about training, for example, while Dean seemed to understand its purpose even when he was miserable, whereas Dean hated research almost as passionately as Sammy loved it, despite Sammy sharing Mary’s distaste for hunting. But those weren’t the only conflicts and contradictions that came up with startling regularity. John was somewhat aware that living on the road as they did made it difficult for them to find the harmony they needed between the two cultures from which they came, but Dean flat-out refused to go back to Lawrence, and Sammy could never settle when they went back to the ranch for Thanksgiving and Christmas (which they did every year). Both boys enjoyed playing with the Chee cousins, but Sam hated being away from children who took more pleasure in books than in outdoor games. Dean enjoyed reading, too, but so adamantly did the younger boy define himself by his reading habits that the cousins finally started calling him _Naaltsoos-miil_ , Thousand Books. Yet as proud as Dean was of his _Diné_ heritage, he preferred to dress like Bobby and Bill, insisted on keeping his hair almost Jarhead-short, and was forever getting into fights at school with any boy who dared to view him as anything other than “the new kid.” (Several of the Chees warned Dean that cutting his hair would bring bad luck, but Amá Sání and John both saw it as a token of his mourning for Mary.) Sammy, on the other hand, for all his fascination with his mother’s literature and his leanings toward Christianity, never wanted to get his hair cut and swore that sneakers made his feet hurt in a way that moccasins didn’t. School dress codes became the bane of his existence—after hunting, that is.

Ellen figured out that part of Sammy’s problem with sneakers was that he kept getting Dean’s hand-me-downs and the soles were worn just enough to fit his foot wrong. There wasn’t much John could do about that, as poor as they were. But Pastor Jim put it down to wanting to distinguish himself from the rest of the family, which was odd, because in most other ways Sammy wanted to be just like everyone else at school.

Bobby and Amá Sání Chee both said at several points during the boys’ childhood that John should try staying put for a while. But Bobby didn’t get enough business at the salvage yard to be able to hire anyone; Bill and Ellen weren’t sure hiring John to tend bar at the Roadhouse would pass muster with the local ATF agents, who weren’t known to be kind to minorities; and John couldn’t find work in Blue Earth or anyplace else near friends he could count on to watch the boys when he was hunting. And even if both boys would have been happy staying with the family in Arizona, the incident with the Shtriga was enough to convince him that they wouldn’t be safe even in Dinétah unless he was with them. The old ways weren’t enough to keep the dark wind away from Sammy.

And that was another puzzle that became harder to solve the older Sammy got. He was sensitive to the supernatural, so much so that the elders thought he would make a good singer or a hand-trembler, and he was a good kid, tenderhearted, driven to help others and save lives. There were things he hated about hunting, just as Mary had, but he never hesitated to run to another person’s aid. His faith was a thing of beauty, even if John couldn’t share it. And as much as life in close quarters meant that they got on each other’s nerves, he and Dean adored each other—it made a certain kind of sense for them to have a private language, almost like twins. Yet the boy attracted evil like a magnet attracts iron, and he had a hair trigger at times and always seemed to know exactly the wrong thing to say to John. It made no sense. Worse still, if a demon mouthed off to John, it might or might not refer to Dean as Monster Slayer, but it never called Sam Child-Born-for-Water; he was always the Boy King. And nobody, not even Bobby, could tell John what that meant.

“ _Bináá’ łitso_ wanted something,” John recalled as he paced in Bobby’s dining room after one such incident on the eve of Sam’s thirteenth birthday. “Wanted it badly enough to make Mary an offer she couldn’t refuse. It was in Sam’s nursery, and the only reason for it to come back _that_ night was that Sam was exactly six months old. The hand-trembler must have sensed _Bináá’ łitso_ ’s interest in Sammy; that’s why he wanted Mary to keep Sammy with her during the _Nidáá_ , for all the good that did. So either _Bináá’ łitso_ took something from Sam, or it did something to him.”

“John, we’ve been over this,” Bobby replied.

“But what if it took his soul?!”

“I think we’d notice something by now, ya idjit. Kid with no soul wouldn’ta run into that burning house three months back just to save someone he’d never met.”

“A marker, then, like a crossroads deal.”

“Standard lease from a crossroads demon is ten years, and a six-month-old ain’t capable of consent.”

John sighed. “So it did something to him. How do we undo it?”

“Until we know what it was, we _can’t_. Even if we did know, it might not be reversible. Look, John, I know you and Sam have your problems, but you’re gonna have to treat him like any other teenager. Whatever that demon did to your boy, it didn’t change the fact that he’s good deep down. Don’t let this ‘Boy King’ business make you forget he’s still your son.”

John stole a glance at the boys playing Monopoly in the living room, chattering happily in Gaelic, and the echo of a misplaced memory stole through his mind, some strange man pleading with Mary— _You’ve got to leave John... you are gonna die, and your children will be cursed...._

None of them had asked for this, least of all Sam. And it was wrong to destroy the sacred unit of the family.

“I’ll try,” he whispered.

* * *

Living on the road was tough financially, especially since their hunts routinely took them to places where garage owners were hesitant to hire Indians or Hispanics. John had to sell almost everything he had to invest in weapons and ammunition, and though he occasionally got welfare checks from the BIA, pool hustling and credit card fraud were quicker and easier than relying on the government. He tried not to ask the family for money unless things were really tight; he knew they didn’t approve and didn’t want them to feel obligated to help him.

But the college fund belonged to the boys. It wasn’t John’s place to do anything else with that money, and it wasn’t his place to tell them what to do with it. They had so little they could call truly their own, apart from their horses and a few sheep each back in Dinétah, that he couldn’t take that from them even if respect for children’s possessions weren’t part of _Diné_ culture; and besides, it was all the inheritance they would ever get from Mary, apart from her journals. He couldn’t add to it now, but he didn’t touch it, simply letting it gather interest until the boys were ready for it.

Somewhere along the way, Dean had given up on school. John couldn’t blame him; hunting was far more important, and school was both boring and full of conflicts with kids who couldn’t see past skin color. Most of his teachers saw him only as a smart aleck and a troublemaker. But Sam loved learning, and even the prospect of life as a hunter didn’t completely discourage him from thinking about college.

The day before Thanksgiving in 1997, while Sam was at Aunt Sarah’s house catching up with his cousins and John was going through his weapons while visiting with Amá Sání Chee, Dean came to John and said, “Dad, I’ve been thinking.”

John didn’t look up from cleaning his gun. “ _Ąą’?_ ”

“I want Sam to have my half of the college fund.”

John did look up at that. “Where did this come from?”

Dean sighed. “Look, while we were in Indiana, Sam’s English teacher asked him if he had ever thought about becoming a writer. That’s the first time a teacher’s seen him as more than a long-haired weirdo in years, and it got him thinking about going to college. No college is gonna look twice at me, I know that, and you need me more than I need school, but Sam wants to give it a try, and... I wanna help him.”

“Dean, I need you _both_. And what if something comes after him at school?”

“Honestly, Dad, when’s the last time you had a hunt on a college campus?” When John didn’t answer right away, Dean stood. “The money’s mine, right? So I’m giving it to Sammy. End of story.” And he walked outside.

“Thousand Books always was more like his mother,” Amá Sání mused in _Diné bizaad_.

John frowned and answered in kind. “You think I should let Sammy go to college?”

“You needed to go away from us to find your path, my grandson. Mary needed to leave her clan. It may be that the same is true of Sam. And if the end of all things is near, you may not be able to protect him from the dark wind much longer even if you are with him every hour of every day.”

John sighed. From what little they knew, _Bináá’ łitso_ was incredibly powerful, stronger than any _chindí_ he’d encountered since, and all the signs still pointed to his wanting Sammy for some special dark purpose. Amá Sání was right, as usual—they had no way of keeping Sam safe forever, even in Dinétah.

And Mary _had_ wanted the boys to go to college.

Early the next morning, after a nightmare in which he’d actually disowned Sam for leaving, John rode out to his thinking spot, the place where he had first read Mary’s journals fourteen years earlier, and settled down to think about Amá Sání’s advice. But no sooner had he done so than a voice said, “I _thought_ I’d find you out here.”

John turned to see his horse edging away from a _Bilagáana_ with light brown hair and a weak face but strong brown eyes and an impish smirk. He hadn’t been standing there a second ago.

“Who are you?” John demanded.

“I’m a friend of Coyote’s,” the man said. “You can call me Loki.”

“Did you follow me?”

“Nah, just passing through. Actually happened to overhear your conversation with your grandmother last night and thought you could use my two-cents’ worth.”

John swallowed hard. He knew better than to trust things that looked human but weren’t, and Loki definitely seemed dangerous. But by the same token, it could be worthwhile to hear what Loki had to say; if nothing else, it would tell him what the other side wanted.

“Gummi bears?” Loki offered, holding up a gold bag of the expensive German kind—Dean’s favorite, and a treat they could rarely afford.

“No, thank you.”

“ _Haribo macht Kinder froh, und Erwachsene eben so_.” He waggled the bag enticingly.

“Really. I’m fine.”

Loki shrugged and shook a few into his hand, then set the bag on John’s saddle. “Listen, John. Sam’s going to go to college whether you want him to or not. That’s not a threat; it’s a fact, and it’s not one anyone other than Sam can change. The more you oppose him on it, the more you’ll harden his resolve. And all you’ll end up doing is fracturing your family. You drive him away, he’ll let down his guard all the more just to spite you and end up listening to influences he ought to ignore. And people will die.”

“Why are you telling me this?” John frowned. “Why do you care?”

“Because Badger’s been trying on horns.” And Loki popped the handful of gummi bears into his mouth.

John’s blood ran cold. “What does that have to do with my sons?”

Loki held up a finger until he swallowed. “I can’t tell you everything I know. Even if I could, you wouldn’t believe me. Just trust me: those two have a starring role in _Apocalypse Now_ , and there’s nothing you can do to change that.”

John nodded slowly. “Okay. Say I let Sam go to college. What happens then?”

Loki shrugged again. “Apocalypse is still going to happen, but I can think of a couple of lives you might be able to save.”

John sighed as he thought it over. His nightmare had been horrible—Dean quietly resenting John’s decision for three years, both of them sneaking off to keep a distant eye on Sam, neither of them spotting the signs of _Bináá’ łitso_ ’s return until it was too late and the family was fractured almost beyond repair. He couldn’t do that to either of his sons... but how was he supposed to keep Sam safe by letting him go out alone into a world determined to turn him into a monster?

Loki scoffed as if he could hear John’s thoughts. “Seriously? You’ve raised two of the best damn hunters in the West, and you’re afraid that little Sammy can’t tie his own shoes?”

John’s eyes narrowed. “I’m his father. I’m supposed to protect him.”

“Doing a bang-up job of that, leaving the boys on their own as often as you do.”

John opened his mouth to retort but suddenly realized he was caught. The only differences between leaving Dean to look after Sam now, or taking Dean with him on a hunt over a weekend while Sam was alone, and letting Sam go to college were the length of the stay, Dean’s presence, and the duration of John’s absence. He did want Sam beside him, both for Sam’s help on the hunt and for John’s peace of mind about Sam’s safety, but how often was he acting on that desire now?

To John, school was a necessary evil. To Mary, it had been an unattainable goal, one that she wanted to make sure the boys could reach. And it wasn’t his place to deny that dream to either son.

Loki just gave him a knowing look and vanished... leaving the gummi bears as a reminder.

* * *

There wasn’t much in Sam’s college fund, they discovered when they called the bank in Lawrence that Monday morning. John had put in only $600 before the fire, and even with the magic of compound interest, it hadn’t grown much at all. But Dean’s... it wouldn’t cover tuition for more than a year, even at a state school, but it would sure help with housing and books and the like, provided Sam could get a good scholarship.

So it was settled. Dean took the GED in Tuba City that Christmas and transferred the money from his college fund to Sam’s, and Sam knuckled down to keep ahead of his studies and crammed for all the entrance tests and such he’d need to take. John didn’t understand most of the acronyms and numbers the boys chattered at each other, especially when they did it in Gaelic, so he had to take their word for it that Sam was doing well.

He _did_ understand “National Merit Scholar,” though, and when word finally came that Sam had made it, John took both boys out for pizza and a movie to celebrate. He also understood “full scholarship,” and the offers began rolling in within a few weeks of the National Merit announcement. The one that most stunned all three of them was the full scholarship offered by Stanford.

After some careful consideration, Sam narrowed his choices to Stanford, Arizona State, and Texas A&M, and while John had several urgent hunts to take care of, Dean drove Sam to all three campuses to help him decide. Arizona State, despite its proximity to family, was discarded both because Sam wasn’t crazy about its approach to pre-professional programs and because the other schools had prettier scenery. At Stanford, Sam got an interview with one of the deans; at A&M, he got the chance to sit in on a couple of classes and to meet informally with several department heads.

John met the boys at Bobby’s after the A&M visit, and he could tell from the expression on their faces when they got out of the car that they’d been thinking and talking seriously all the way from College Station. “ _Ąą’?_ ” he asked as soon as they walked up to him.

“He’s gonna be a lot happier at A&M,” Dean answered, and Sam nodded his agreement.

“You’re sure about this?” John pressed. “Stanford... that’s a very prestigious school. And they don’t give full rides to just anybody.”

“Stanford wants me ’cause I’m _Diné_ ,” Sam replied. “A&M wants me ’cause I’m smart.”

Well, when he put it that way....

“What are you gonna major in, Sam?” Bobby asked.

“Linguistics. Maybe pre-law, maybe pre-med. I figure it’s a good idea to be able to speak to victims in their own language.”

Bobby nodded. “Very sensible.”

They stayed in Sioux Falls all that spring, both to allow Sam to finish school in one place and to allow the family to take on some hunts on the various reservations around the state that Bobby had been saving for them. Something was stirring up ghosts and monsters of various kinds on all of the reservations, but the white hunters Bobby knew hadn’t been able to get very far. So John and Dean, and Sam when he had time, set about blending in, making inquiries, and taking out the bad things.

The people they helped were always grateful, but the holy men always looked oddly at Dean and frowned at Sam. John finally managed to corner one of them, a Lakota, and demand an answer.

The holy man just shook his head. “A storm is coming for us all, Rifleman. Your sons, both of them... they are _wakan_ , sacred, but darkness and light make war around them. They have the power to save the world or to destroy it.” He shrugged. “It makes no sense, I know, but that’s what I see.”

John refrained from remarking that it didn’t make sense only because the Sioux never contemplated the end of the world; that wasn’t entirely fair, and it wouldn’t be polite to say. He simply thanked the man and let Dean snark about peyote users all the way back to the motel. And when at last they caught the demon that was behind the disturbances and it was stupid enough to mouth off to him _in Sioux_ , John took immense satisfaction in sending it back to Hell. Apparently it hadn’t gotten the memo as to which nation the Winchesters belonged to.

John still hadn’t figured out what his boys had to do with the Apocalypse, though he assumed _Bináá’ łitso_ had some role in the whole mess. But when Sam pressed him about what the Lakota had said, he told the boy not to worry about it. Graduation and college were stress enough for one teen.

In the end, only a handful of John and Bobby’s hunting friends were able to come to Sioux Falls for the graduation itself. But Bobby paid for a videotape, so John was able to take the tape and the boys back to Dinétah for a family celebration. And celebrate the family did, in a way John hadn’t seen since before Mary died, and with two major surprises for Sam.

While Sam and Dean had been investigating colleges, the Chees and Joe and Emily Winchester had been debating graduation gifts. And although it had taken a considerable contribution from every member of the extended family, they had managed to scrape together enough money to buy Sam a laptop computer and an inkjet printer. John had consulted with Ash, the MIT dropout whom Ellen had half adopted, as to what to buy, and Ash had gotten them a good deal on a machine he said would last Sam all four years and possibly beyond; but Amá Sání Chee insisted on having it blessed and making the presentation herself. Sam was so overwhelmed that he barely choked out a quiet “ _Ahéhee’_ ,” but the tears spilling down his cheeks were thanks enough for Amá Sání.

Sam’s other graduation gift from the Chees was a chestnut filly with a star and white stockings. Sam promptly named her Aggie.

“Aggie?!” Dean echoed incredulously.

“It’s short for Agatha,” Sam replied haughtily, and Aggie snorted as if to say, “So there.”

Dean laughed. “Dude, I am _so_ glad you’re not going to Stanford. Your poor horse would never recover if you named her Cardinal.”

“I guess Aggie’s better than Reveille,” mused Aunt Sarah, and everyone laughed at that.

* * *

Midsummer’s Day of 2005 found Sam, newly recovered from a horrific bout of mono, in College Station making up his incompletes and filling out applications to law schools, while his girl Jessica was in Europe doing some study-abroad course and John and Dean were in Indiana, chasing down a rawhead. And they caught the monster none too soon; seconds after they got back to the motel after a post-hunt beer, a supercell thunderstorm crashed down on them and took the power with it. Dean grumbled and turned in early, but John took the time to update his journal by candlelight before sitting back to think as he watched Dean sleep.

Loki’s advice had proven to be wise after all. Though John and Dean had missed Sam’s presence on the hunts they undertook during the school year, they had kept in contact, and giving Sam space to do his own thing seemed to have truly lessened the tensions among them. They both approved of Sam’s girlfriend, even though she’d been more awkward around the Chees that first Christmas than Mary had been. And Sam, without prompting, had caught on to no fewer than three demons possessing his friends and sent them back to Hell. The family was still intact... but John was beginning to wonder if his sons’ safety might not require him to put that unity on the line.

He hadn’t told the boys yet, but thanks to the research he’d done at A&M and Baylor while they were taking care of Sam that spring, he’d finally gotten most of the pieces put together with regard to _Bináá’ łitso_. Azazel, its name was, one of their original suspects. He thought he knew how to track it, now that it had finally become active again after twenty-some years. He even thought he’d gotten a solid lead on the Colt, if Daniel Elkins would quit holding out on him. The question was, after all these years, whether it might not be safer to leave the boys to their own devices while he took down Azazel on his own. Leave Sammy in Texas, send Dean back to the ranch, keep them both off the demon’s radar a while longer, before... before the enemy could penetrate the stronghold of Dinétah. Before the badger grew horns.

He was still considering his options when his cell phone rang.

“Dad?” Sam’s voice sounded small and very, very shaken.

“What is it, Sam? _Haidzaa?_ ”

“When... when Mom died... _Bináá’ łitso_ pinned her to the ceiling, right?”

John’s hand tightened around the phone. “Why do you ask?”

“I had this nightmare....”

And lightning flashed across the sky from east to west.


	5. Epilogue: Shitsílí Shíká Doogááł

“By yon bonny banks and by yon bonny braes / Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond....”

Joe Winchester sighed as he watched his grandson standing by the corral and singing softly to one of the horses—Sam’s favorite horse, Aggie. She’d been Sam’s high school graduation gift.

Now she and Dean were mourning together.

“Where me and _mo bhràthair_ will never meet again / On the bonny, bonny banks o’ Loch Lomond....”

Joe still remembered the Christmas when Sam finally got tired of Dean’s whistling the AC/DC version of the old Scots tune and forced him to learn the lyrics. And laughed when Dean said, “Dude, that’s _depressing_.”

When had they learned Gaelic? He’d never noticed them speaking it before.

“Ye’ll take the high road... and I’ll take the low road... And I’ll be to Lawrence afore ye....” Dean’s voice cracked, and Aggie gently nuzzled his shoulder as he began to cry quietly.

If history was any guide, this would be the last time Dean would speak English until he worked through his grief.

Joe was suddenly aware of someone else standing beside him—the _Bóhólníihii bidiyingo yá Dį́’íjį́ Nida’anish_ who looked like some _Bilagáana_ accountant, the one Sarah’s kids called _Bináá’ yágo dootł’izh_... Castiel, that was his name. He’d shown up several times when John’s boys were visiting these last two years, but this was probably the first time since the world... didn’t end four days earlier.

“I thought he was in Indiana,” the angel said in _Diné bizaad_.

“Indiana?” Joe asked. “ _Hait’éegochą’?_ ”

“There is a woman there whose son might be Dean’s. Sam made him promise to try to live a normal life with her.”

Aggie nudged Dean, and he climbed onto the top rail of the fence and then onto Aggie’s bare back. She looked back at him, but he simply sat there, listlessly stroking her mane. The horse then looked at Joe and Castiel for a moment and took off for the other side of the corral, jumped the fence, and cantered off into the hills.

“She can wait,” Joe declared. “We can give him normal here. Sam was always the one who wanted the city house and the white picket fence, thought that would solve everything. Dean remembers a time when it didn’t.”

Joe also remembered the year after Mary died, when Dean refused to speak English—if he spoke at all—because English was his mother’s language and it made him cry. However much he’d tried to hide it, and as much as he loved his mother and her heritage, Dean’s heart had always been closest to his father’s people. And Joe knew that when Dean had given up hope and planned to say yes to Michael, just hours before Sarah’s grandson Adam had disappeared, Sam and Castiel had intercepted Dean in Jericho, Texas, because Sam knew that the last stop on his farewell tour was going to be Dinétah.

Castiel nodded thoughtfully as he watched Dean and Aggie disappearing into the distance. “Yes. It will be better this way.” Then he turned and laid a hand on the wall of the hooghan, letting out a brief burst of white light.

“Why did you do that?”

“I have placed wards upon your hooghan. Dean will be safe here for as long as he wishes to remain.”

Joe frowned. “I thought the war was over.”

Castiel shook his head. “We have stopped the Apocalypse, but Heaven and Hell are in disarray. There may yet be demons and other monsters who will try to kill Dean, or to kill you in order to torment him. I am needed elsewhere and can no longer watch over him in person.”

Joe glanced back out at the hills and sighed, then turned back to Castiel. “Will you stay for lunch, my grandson?”

Castiel nearly smiled. “Thank you, my grandfather. I will.”

* * *

The land was Sarah’s now, since both Emily and her mother had passed on during the famine, and the hooghan that John had grown up in had been torn down because they hadn’t been able to get Emily to the hospital in time. But Sarah had insisted that Joe build a new hooghan for himself nearby for the boys’ sake. “We’re the only family they have,” she argued, “the only constant thing in their lives except for Bobby Singer, especially now that John is dead. If we change too much... they may not survive.”

Neither of them had known then how right she was.

Dean stayed on the ranch all summer, leaving the Impala under a tarp and riding only horses, helping tend the livestock and doing chores and growing nearly as brown as his Chee cousins. He refused to go into town except at greatest need, unwilling or unable to face being called Monster Slayer, hailed as a hero by the elders, or having to answer questions about Sam under any of his nicknames—and the Holy People have mercy on anyone but Joe who mentioned the scar on Dean’s left shoulder or asked whether he knew what had happened to Adam. And as when Mary died, Dean spoke only _Diné bizaad_ the entire time, even with Castiel, who came to visit at least once a week and quickly became just as much a part of the family as Dean was.

When the heat started getting bad around mid-June, Joe suggested that they consider moving into Sarah’s house, which had air conditioning. Dean responded by building a summer hooghan by himself, which Castiel warded while muttering something about St. Anthony.

“I think he wants to suffer,” Castiel explained when Joe cornered him about it. “He knows that Sam wanted him to be able to get out of hunting, to go on living, but he can’t let himself enjoy modern comforts knowing that Sam’s in Hell. He thinks he doesn’t deserve it.”

It wasn’t just air conditioning, either. Joe managed to convince Dean not to drown himself in alcohol, but Dean would often ride out into the hills with minimal provisions and a handgun and knife, sometimes on one of his own horses but often on Aggie, and stay away for two or three days at a time, and Joe had no way of knowing what he did out there. Castiel did report that he wasn’t doing anything to break his final promise to Sam, but they were both worried about him.

And then, one evening at the end of September, Joe heard Dean shouting something in the distance and ran outside to see Aggie returning at a gallop with not one rider, but two—and the second....

“ _Shinálí hastįį! Shinálí hastįį! Shoo, shoo!_ _Naaltsoos-miil shaa níyá!!_ ”

Joe could scarcely believe it, but it was true. Even from a distance, there was no mistaking Thousand Books for anyone else.

Dean had his hands full getting Sam into the hooghan, however. Still wearing the clothes he had supposedly died in, Sam was pale, disoriented, and shaking as if he hadn’t eaten in days; his eyes were glassy and unfocused, and he could neither follow what Dean was saying to him in _Diné bizaad_ nor put together a coherent sentence in any other language. Dean, for his part, seemed to have forgotten his other native language entirely and kept fussing at Sam in _Diné bizaad_. It wasn’t until Joe grabbed the arm that wasn’t around Dean’s neck and pulled it across his own shoulders, ignoring the fact that Sam smelled like Iwo Jima, that Sam managed a “ _Grandpére?_ ”

French. That was a new one. Fortunately, Joe knew just enough French to be able to answer, “ _Oui, c’est moi_ ” as they all but carried Sam into the hooghan.

And that seemed to flip a switch for both boys.

“Y’r accent’s _t’rr’ble_ , G’n’pa,” Sam slurred.

“So’s yours, Sasquatch,” Dean shot back, and they settled him beside the hearth.

“Howw’d _you_ know, D’n?”

“Dude, you sound like you’re drunk.”

“Nnngh... _tha am pathadh orm_.”

Dean swallowed hard and replied, “ _Dè ghabhas tu?_ ”

“ _Uisge._ ”

“ _Glè mhath._ ” Dean shot Joe a worried look and got Sam a glass of holy water.

Sam took a sip and frowned. “D’you put corn pollen in this?”

Dean blinked. “No. Why?”

“Tastes funny.” But he drank the rest of it in one gulp. “Guess my taste buds are kinda messed up.”

“Hell will do that to you.”

Sam handed the glass back to Dean. “ _Ahéhee’_. I’m gonna pass out now.” And he did so, nearly knocking Joe over in the process.

“’Swhy we call ’im Thousand Books—that’s how much he weighs,” Dean grumbled, but Joe could still see the concern in his grandson’s green eyes.

“A thousand paperbacks don’t weigh _that_ much,” Joe teased and got an amused glare for his trouble. “Since when do you two speak Gaelic?”

Dean sighed and started working Sam’s jacket off. “Sammy was... twelve, I guess? Wanted to do a report on Scotland for World History, and Bobby suggested he try learning a little Gaelic to impress the teacher. Sam asked me to help him practice, and... next thing I know, we’re speaking it to each other all the time, and Dad comes back from a hunt lookin’ at us like we’re nuts.” He shrugged. “We’re Campbells, Grandfather. We just... wanted more of a heritage than soup can labels.”

Joe laid a hand on Dean’s right shoulder. “Mary would be proud of you both, my grandson. So would your father. So am I.”

Dean looked up at him then and whispered, “ _Ahéhee’, shinálí hastįį._ ”

Together they got Sam stripped to his boxers, and Dean gave his brother a gentle sponge bath and washed his long hair in a basin while Joe took his sulfurous clothes outside to air and retrieved his duffle from the trunk of the Impala. They had just gotten him into a clean T-shirt and shorts and onto a bed when Castiel appeared.

“ _Shoo_ , Cas,” Dean whispered, gesturing toward his sleeping brother.

“I am glad, Dean,” Castiel replied gently. “He did not deserve to die.” After a pause, he continued, “I’m sorry, but I have bad news. Crowley is holding Bobby’s soul for ransom.”

Dean frowned. “Can he do that?”

“It depends on the terms of the contract, and of course he won’t let me see it. But he is demanding that Bobby give him a powerful artifact that even I can’t find. If Bobby doesn’t come up with it in two weeks, Crowley will kill him.”

Dean spat a Gaelic curse. “Can you heal Sam? Kid deserves a break, but we _can’t_ let Bobby die.”

Castiel touched two fingers to Sam’s forehead, and the boy’s hazel eyes were clear when he sat up and blinked at the angel. “Cas? What... what are you doin’ here? What’s goin’ on?”

“Bobby needs us,” Dean replied, handing Sam a clean pair of jeans. “I’ll explain on the way.”

“Bobby’s alive?”

“Yeah, but not for long if Crowley gets his way.”

Sam echoed Dean’s Gaelic curse and threw on his jeans, socks, and boots while Dean stuffed his own possessions back into his duffle.

“Sorry to leave like this, Grandfather,” Dean said, giving Joe a one-armed hug. “We’ll be back for Thanksgiving, I promise.”

“What do you want me to do with Sam’s clothes?” Joe asked.

“Burn ’em,” the brothers chorused—and oh, Joe had missed their speaking in stereo.

Castiel stepped toward Dean. “Dean, I could....”

“We’re driving,” they chorused again.

Sam hugged Joe and accepted his duffle. “Love you, Grandpa.”

“ _Hágoónee’, shinálíké_ ,” Joe replied.

And then they were out the door, Dean calling over his shoulder, “ _Sołtį’_ , Cas!”

Castiel hesitated, but Joe chuckled. “Go, Castiel. I’ll see you at Thanksgiving.”

“ _Hágoónee’_ ,” Castiel nodded and vanished.

As the familiar roar of the Impala’s engine reached his ears, Joe stepped to the door of the hooghan and waved goodbye to his grandsons... all three of them. Monster Slayer, Thousand Books, Blue Eyes. Between them, they had saved the world, though Joe didn’t quite understand how it had all happened, and he had _no_ clue as to how Sam, beyond all hope, had returned to them.

Aggie was still standing near the door looking bewildered, forgotten in all the excitement. And as Joe walked her back to the corral, a badger came out of the brush to investigate the commotion—a very plain badger that showed no signs of growing horns.

Joe sighed and looked down the road again at the cloud of dust obscuring the Impala. And he wondered... without their _Diné_ family to keep them sane, could Sam and Dean still have won their war?

He decided he’d rather not know.


	6. Glossary

Navajo Glossary  
(words in order of appearance)

Diné – “The People,” the name by which the Navajo Nation referred to themselves officially until the early 1970s; many Navajo still call themselves _Diné_

Ashiihi – Salt Clan

Dinétah – “Among the People,” name of the Navajo homeland

Diné bizaad – the Navajo language

Amá Sání / Shimásání – maternal grandmother (the _shi-_ prefix indicates first person possession)

’Aii chidí doo nín’zin’ígíí da – That car is not that which you want.

Yáát’ééh – Greetings (which was frequently and unfortunately used as the standard Indian greeting in B Westerns, regardless of tribe—in _McLintock!_ , for example, the extras look somewhat bemused that the Comanche characters greet each other in Navajo!)

Kót’ée ga’ Diné bikéyahdi – That’s the way it is in Navajo country.

Shizhé’é yéé ho’ałtsosįįh yínaashineeztą́ą́ – My father taught me everything he knew.

ei’ nishli – I am born to (my mother’s clan is)

Tódích’íi’nii – Bitter Water Clan

bá shíshchíín – I am born for (my father’s clan is)

Ahéhee’ – Thank you

Bilagáana – Anglo-American

Tséghadínídinii – Crystal Rock Clan

Nít’éego niidooshąął – I love you just the way you are.

K’ad’ee’, tsį́į́łgo – Now will be a good time, hurry.

shiyéyóó – my beloved husband

Bitsii’ łichxíí – Red Hair

hádí biniinaa ’ást’į bik’i’diishtííh. Doo haa nihish’į ’įst’į baa jiinishba’. Doo... yishąąd. – I understand why he acts that way. And I forgive him (for) what it does to us. And... I love him.

Nilchíní niidlį́į́. – We’re your children.

yinishyé – I am called

bíká nimí, nihimásání – after your mother, our grandmother

dóone’é – clan

shitsílí bidiné – my younger brother is called

bíká nizhé’é, nihicheii – after your father, our grandfather

Bénáshnii – I remember it

Zhini – African-American

yei (plural _yeii_ ) – protective/healing spirit that mediates between the _Diné_ and their gods, invoked in the Night Chant ritual by _yei bi chei_ dancers and sand paintings

Haidzaa? – What happened?

’Akonee’ – you’ll see

chidí bi’tiin – highway

shiye’ – my son

chindí – evil spirits

Nidáá – Enemy Way ceremony

’Áhóódin – There’s no such thing.

hooghan góne’ ninááh – go inside the house

Bináá’ łitso – Yellow Eyes

Ąą’? – Well?

Bóhólníihii bidiyingo yá Dį́’íjį́ Nida’anish – angel of the Lord for Thursday

Bináá’ yágo dootł’izh – His eyes are blue

Hait’éegochą’? – Why?

Shinálí hastįį! Shinálí hastįį! Shoo, shoo! Naaltsoos-miil shaa níyá!! – Grandfather! Grandfather! Look, look! Thousand Books came to me!!

Hágoónee’, shinálíké – Goodbye, my grandsons

Sołtį’ – Let’s go

Chapter Titles:

1 – Sometime in the Morning

2 – Our House Is a [Very, Very,] Very Fine House

3 – Monster Slayer and He Who Cuts the Life Out of the Enemy

4 – I Make the Family Business My Occupation

Epilogue – My Brother Will Come for Me

Navajo spelling isn’t standardized; I’ve had to cobble together the few lines of dialogue that I’ve translated into _Diné bizaad_ using several different sources that used different orthographic conventions, so I’m not sure I’ve been consistent. And since I didn’t know more than a word or two of Navajo when I started this story, I didn’t dare try anything more complicated! But many, many thanks to kcrenegade for running it by a native speaker for me.

Pronunciation:

Navajo is a tonal language that has no diphthongs. A single vowel without an accent is a low tone; a single vowel with an accent is a high tone; a hook under a vowel indicates that it is nasal. Doubled vowels are held longer, but the pronunciation does not change; if only the second is accented, it is a rising tone; if only the first is accented, it is a falling tone.

a = ah (as in father)

e = eh (as in they)

i = ee (as in police)

o = oh (as in note)

’ = glottal stop (think of a Cockney saying “li’le me’al bo’letops”)

gh = like the _g_ in saguaro

ł = voiceless l (similar to Welsh _ll_ )

j = similar to the _dg_ in judge or to Russian _dzh_

* * *

Gaelic Glossary

Bithidh sinn nior air rugadh – We will never have been born.

mo bhràthair – my brother

tha am pathadh orm – I’m thirsty

Dè ghabhas tu? – What will you have?

Uisge – Water

Glè mhath – Very well.


	7. Notes

This AU, mostly written in the first half of July 2010, was inspired by the dark_agenda Racebending Revenge Challenge, specifically the SPN AU in which Mary is Korean—I had to wonder what would happen if _John_ were the minority parent, and I immediately thought of both my distant cousin’s half-Cherokee wife (who has pretty green eyes like Our Boys) and the Navajo Code Talkers (what with John being a Marine and all), and a very little bit of online research revealed that the Navajo connection could actually work very well. My own ethnic heritage is weighted heavily on the European end, and my American Indian heritage does not include Navajo, but I was a Code Talker fangirl long before _Windtalkers_ came out—in fact, I haven’t seen the movie because I hear it’s far more about Nicholas Cage’s character and rather stupid overall.

So this story of _Diné_!John sort of wrote itself. Though I wrote most of it on the fly, I did my best to use genuine _Diné_ sources, and I did manage to find a beta with some personal ties to Navajo culture. Where I’ve had to wing it most is in negotiating the culture clash, since I’ve been blessed to live among people who view American Indian heritage as a positive thing; if I’ve been unjust, I humbly apologize for the shortcoming. And I hope it’s clear that John is not the most reliable of narrators in any ’verse.

Ray Tracey, my _Diné_!John, is a renowned Navajo jeweler who worked as an actor in the ’70s and ’80s; I found his IMDb page and thought he was perfect for the part. (I think he’s better-looking than both Matt Cohen and JDM, honestly.)

Disclaimer on terminology: Different tribes, and even different individuals, have widely varied and often vehement opinions as to whether to use American Indian, Native American, First People, or what have you. I believe American Indian is more accurate than the other terms, despite its dodgy origin, but I also recognize that plain “Indian” can have racist connotations, so I’ve tried to identify John and his family primarily as _Diné_ except in culture-clash contexts. “Navajo” is an outsider’s term, coming from Tewa via Spanish, but it’s become more commonly accepted among the _Diné_ in recent years, and I’d expect John to start thinking of himself as Navajo more frequently the longer he lives in Lawrence. But there’s no question that “Injun” and “half-breed” are slurs.

“The rez” is common slang for the reservation; I wouldn’t have used it myself if I hadn’t come across it on sites written and maintained by genuine American Indians.

Also, a note on the term “clan” (because I understand there was a dustup on the subject in SG-1 circles): Both Scottish and Navajo societies place heavy emphasis on the clan as an extended family unit, though the basis of clan membership differs—Scots is patrilineal, _Diné_ is matrilineal. Clan Campbell is among the most powerful of the Highland clans, and the Salt Clan is, as far as I can tell from the mythology I’ve read, one of the oldest _Diné_ clans. This kinship structure has nothing to do with the Ku Klux Klan, and both the context and the spelling ought to make clear which I mean.

Title: The title comes from “When All Things Come to an End” by Ray Baldwin Louis on Discover Navajo; “the badger will grow horns” is one of the signs of the Apocalypse, as are an increase of intermarriage between Navajos and non-Navajos, a major famine, and lightning flashing across the sky from east to west. Interestingly enough, two of the four major omens stipulated in Navajo mythology supposedly occurred in the 1950s and ’60s—in other words, during John Winchester’s childhood!

Names: Quite a few _Diné_ have very Anglo-sounding legal names, and not a few of those family names were the result of a Bureau of Indian Affairs registrar not understanding the _Diné_ name, so a full-blooded _Diné_ named John Winchester is plausible. He would have a _Diné_ name as well, but since he was anxious to get away from certain parts of his heritage, he would think of himself more by his English name. However, Navajo identification is not limited to the individual’s name; when introducing oneself to another Navajo, one usually begins with at least the names of the parents’ clans, maternal and paternal, and a son belongs to his mother’s clan. So in 1973, John tells Dean that his mother belongs to the Salt Clan and his father to the Bitter Water Clan, and Dean replies that his mother was white and his father belonged to the Crystal Rock Clan (which seemed to me the obvious choice for a Van Halen). And yes, the clan names for John were deliberate choices. Grandmother Chee is a nod to Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels featuring Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, detectives with the Navajo Tribal Police; there were also several Chees among the Code Talkers.

In 1978, Michael identifies himself to John by translating his name—Michael literally means “Who is like God?” And the Navajo Bible refers to Yahweh as _Diyin God_ to distinguish him from the other gods.

The _Diné_ also give nicknames readily based on a person’s most notable characteristics. The Chees’ calling Sam “Thousand Books,” for example, refers only to the fact that he defines himself as someone who loves to read. (Joe’s not quite right about the weight, though—a thousand four-ounce paperbacks would weigh 250 pounds, and Jared, last I checked, weighs 220.)

Alcohol: Federal law prohibits alcohol on the Navajo reservation. That doesn’t mean that the _Diné_ never drink—but those who do often become alcoholics. It’s not a problem limited to the Navajo, either; many tribes have a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism, and veterans are especially susceptible (Ira Hayes and Pappy Boyington are two famous examples who come to mind). Canon!John has his alcoholic periods, as do Sam and Dean and Bobby and probably most of the other hunters they know, so it makes sense that _Diné_!John would trend that way as well, perhaps even more strongly than in canon.

Religion: Not all Navajos, even those who live on the reservation, adhere to the old _Diné_ beliefs; some are orthodox Christians, while others belong to the Native American Church, which mixes native rituals and peyote use with some elements of Christianity. Given what we know of John’s spiritual journey in canon, however, it made more sense to me for him to have a very traditional _Diné_ upbringing and for his agnosticism to arise both from his rebellion against those traditions and from the balance of supernatural power in SPN-verse being distinctly against the Navajo gods. (It’s also worth noting that sources differ on details of Navajo beliefs, sometimes to a considerable extent; for example, one text that’s available online, compiled from both oral tradition and the records of Catholic missionaries, refers to Changing Woman as White Bead Woman.) Another advantage to giving John a traditional background is that it allows for an allegorical connection between John, especially through Dean and Sam, and the twin sons of Changing Woman, Monster Slayer and Child-Born-for-Water (whom Monster Slayer later renamed He Who Cuts the Life Out of the Enemy). The Hero Twins’ exploits are a crucial part of the Navajo origin mythos and form the basis for the Enemy Way, one of the two major Navajo ceremonial rites (the other being the Blessing Way). The Enemy Way is intended to exorcise the ghosts of aliens and the effects of violence, and it is frequently sung for returning veterans.

As for the Sioux: I have not been able to find any definitive, reliable description of Lakota beliefs regarding the Apocalypse, and I get the impression that eschatology isn’t terribly important to traditional Sioux. The Native American Church also seems very vague about its doctrines on last things.

Communication: Even today, many Navajo homes on the reservation don’t have landline telephones because of their remoteness, and wireless service for both phone and Internet is limited. In the ’70s and ’80s, the only options for someone in Lawrence wanting to reach the Chee-Winchester family would have been snail mail or telegram. CB radio was also popular on the reservation well into the ’90s and was used somewhat like the old party-line telephones, but its range was limited to fifty miles.

Skinwalkers: In my opinion, “All Dogs Go to Heaven” really wasted a great MOTW. As portrayed in Navajo lore, skinwalkers are witches who use necromancy to transform into animals (especially coyotes), and they are every bit as dangerous as the other witches we see in canon. If you want to see Jossed-but-canonish Sam and Dean up against that kind of skinwalker, I heartily recommend “The Cloak” by greeneyes_fan and its remix by i_speak_tongue (Dean h/c ahoy!).

Wounded Knee: Accounts differ as to exactly how it all went down, but from February 27 to May 5, 1973, there was a standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, between federal agents and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) who were protesting the terrible conditions and overt racism faced by the people of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; two Feds and several protesters were killed, and murder rates on the reservation spiked for several years afterward. The protesters selected Wounded Knee because it was the site of the last massacre of American Indians by the US Army during the Indian Wars. The conflict gained national attention when, in what was supposed to be a show of solidarity with the protesters, Marlon Brando sent an Apache woman to the Oscars in his stead to refuse the award he won that year. Though many _Diné_ have no use for Russell Means and the AIM, it would not have been a good time for John to be the chief suspect in the murders of Samuel and Deanna Campbell. (It wouldn’t have been good in canon, either, but _Diné_!John would have had an even harder time figuring out what to do about it.)

The Long Walk: The Navajo equivalent of the Cherokee Trail of Tears: During the Civil War, a cavalry detachment under Kit Carson rounded up the Navajo and forced them to walk all the way to Fort Sill. It wasn’t until 1868 that the tribal leaders convinced Washington to establish a new reservation in (one of the least desirable parts of) what had previously been Navajo territory because so many _Diné_ were dying of disease and starvation in Oklahoma.

Mary’s Journals: According to transcripts on SuperWiki of the early entries in John’s journal, Mary still had her old hunting journals locked away in the family safe, but they were destroyed in the fire. Azazel obviously knew how to cover his tracks. But from what he says to Dean in “In the Beginning,” it sounds like he had to get permission to enter a home unless he possessed its owner. If that’s correct, then Mary could conceivably have left her journals with someone else for safe keeping before the deal came due, but in canon she was cut off from the only group of people she could have trusted to take the journals without asking questions, namely hunters. In this AU, however, she does have Grandmother Chee as something of a confidant—I can’t see her opening up about hunting completely, but she could at least trust that Grandmother Chee would keep the journals safe and unread until either Mary survived the deal or John came looking for answers regarding her death. Then again, the survival of the journals poses a problem for Michael’s erasure of John and Mary’s memories of 2010!Dean; surely she would have written down at least the fact that she had met Dean in ’73, if not the full warning he gave her. Hence the smudges. Also, “Family Matters” established Elton Ridge as the canon name of the place where John proposed (assuming Samuel was brought back to the place where he officially died); it first appeared in the comic _Origins 1_ , which is extremely dodgy on canon details.

School: I was blessed with good public schools for most of my grade school years, but even in canon, Sam and Dean seem to have gotten stuck with mostly mediocre to poor schools, and even decent schools can view underprivileged minority and learning-disabled students more as demographic ticky boxes and funding sources than as kids who might actually want to learn. It’s not clear how much stock Canon!John put in formal education, but _Diné_!John doesn’t get the point, and that attitude eventually rubs off on Dean. And I do think Canon!Dean is both mildly dyslexic and G/T, but that’s meta for another day.

Scots Gaelic: In canon, Sam and Dean don’t seem all that interested in Mary’s side of the family prior to “In the Beginning.” We know now that Mary was estranged from the other Campbells because of having left the hunting life, and John probably didn’t try to contact them when he started hunting himself (if he even knew at the time that they were hunters). But the Winchesters’ nomadic lifestyle doesn’t seem to have made that estrangement any more hurtful than it would be for a normal family; relatives outside the immediate family seem to be just another one of the Normal Things Winchesters Don’t Have™. In this ’verse, however, both the fact that the boys know that their heritage is mixed (“ _Dóone’é Campbell ei’ nishli, Ashiihi bá shíshchíín_ ”) and the fact that the Navajo side of the family remains intact while the immediate family spends most of its time in the dominant culture seem to me to be factors that would push them to try to find some kind of anchor in white culture to help them get their bearings. By _Diné_ logic, they are more truly Campbells than John is, but without a connection to Mary’s extended family, there’s only one other basis for that identity: the family’s Scottish roots. And, since _Diné_ _bizaad_ is part of their Salt Clan identity, Scots Gaelic is a natural part of their Campbell identity.

At least, that’s how it made the most sense to me. YMMV; please don’t beat me with a stick, please....

Loki: Okay, I couldn’t resist throwing Gabriel in. The German line is the original text of the Haribo jingle (literally, “Haribo makes kids happy, and grown-ups, too”). And John’s initial observation about Gabriel is based on this exchange from _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ , in which Mr. Beaver gives some sensible advice:

> “No, no, there isn’t a drop of real human blood in the Witch.”
> 
> “That’s why she’s bad all through, Mr. Beaver,” said Mrs. Beaver.
> 
> “True enough, Mrs. Beaver,” replied he, “there may be two views about humans (meaning no offense to the present company). But there’s no two views about things that look like humans and aren’t.”
> 
> “I’ve known good Dwarfs,” said Mrs. Beaver.
> 
> “So’ve I, now you come to speak of it,” said her husband, “but precious few, and they were the ones least like men. But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”


End file.
